The big love-in between unions and business has dominated the lead-up to the Jobs and Skills Summit this week. But the summit is at serious risk of looking out of touch because the single most urgent skills issue in our nation right now is the severe shortage of employees.
Last week in Griffith – western NSW’s prolific foodbowl – I met farmers despairing at the prospect of produce falling from trees and rotting on the ground because no one was around to pick it. The harvest should be a windfall of cheap fruit for families, but it’s going to waste for want of a workforce.
In Sydney’s CBD I’ve met cafe owners unable to open because, despite having customers, there are no staff to serve them.
Booking a tradie is next to impossible, and if you want a dentist or GP appointment be prepared to wait. Schools need more teachers, hospitals need more doctors and nurses, and the construction sector has been at capacity for months, with projects big and small facing major delays.
I could go on. The point is, businesses and unions bonding over EBAs is nice but it’s not the priority.
The skills shortage must be at the top of the skills summit agenda, and this week, state and territory first ministers and treasurers jointly wrote to the Prime Minister expressing that view and urging immediate action.
We’ve put forward a range of ideas: from expanding the temporary increase in the intake of skilled migrants to reviving pandemic policies that worked well, such as allowing retirees to re-enter the workforce without incurring financial penalties; to longer-term priorities such as urgently finalising a new national skills agreement.
Our message is clear, and we are ready to work with the federal government, industry and unions to boost the national workforce and ease the pressure on a short-staffed nation.
So why has the lead-up to the summit been so preoccupied with proposals from unions that collectively represent only 14 per cent of Australian workers? I fear the answer lies in the sea of red in which our nation is awash. All but two of nine Australian state, territory and federal governments are now Labor governments.
This reflects a significant shift in the wishes of the voting public, and those wishes are to be respected. But it also creates the risk of overreach, an unfortunate recurring theme in the economic life of our nation.
From Labor’s union-led wage excesses in the 1970s to the Coalition’s Work Choices excesses of the mid-2000s, industrial relations overreach always ends badly for the Australian people.
In the current delicate economic environment, none of us can afford an industrial relations agenda that goes too far in either direction. Yet we are already seeing concerning signs.
One headline this week came courtesy of Unions NSW and its top submission to the skills summit: a proposal to cut the wages of non-union members. It’s a divisive policy, completely out of touch with the 86 per cent of workers who are not union members. But it is hardly surprising, coming from the same organisation that gleefully declared 2022 would be “the year of the strike” in NSW.
And so it is. As we speak, public sector union bosses in NSW are waging a campaign of strikes, making unreasonable demands on taxpayer funds when post-Covid fiscal repair and post-floods financial support are vital, and refusing to drive new state-of-the-art trains that will lift productivity.
The unions don’t seem to understand: it’s not your political adversaries you’re hurting, it’s the families who can’t get to work and whose cost of living will only rise further and faster if they have to foot the bill for excessive public service pay rises.
This failure by unions to see the pain they are causing smacks of hubris and bodes poorly for our nation’s delicately poised economy, where inflation is already high.
Of course, I hardly expect Labor or the unions to heed the warnings of a vastly outnumbered Liberal Premier. So instead take it from union luminary Bill Kelty who, reflecting on his own work in the union movement, flatly concluded that when militant unions demanded more than was fair in an inflationary environment, “it never works”.
Speaking of the union largesse of the 1970s, Kelty warned “when we toted up what we got at the end of a decade of fighting, we’d made but marginal gain”. Tempting as it may be for unions to run rampant with Labor governments from coast to coast, now is the time to put the nation first and for the federal Labor government to keep them in check lest we all pay a heavy price for no gain.
Kelty also observed “the real gains you make out of society come from the productive capacity of the nation”. He was right. Productivity and skills are the means to a more prosperous Australia. That’s what working Australians expect their leaders to deliver out of this summit. So that is where our undivided focus must be over the next two days.
Dominic Perrottet is the NSW Premier.
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