In a global war for talent and skills, we will win

For all the sombre predictions about what may lie ahead in a post-Covid world, I prefer to look on the bright side.

The Department of Skills, Education and Employment host a jobs fair in Cairns. Picture: Brendan Radke

There is no shortage of sombre predictions about the calamities that may lie ahead for Australians in a post-Covid world. The end of globalisation will diminish the prosperity of our trading economy. Strategic threats will test the resolve of peace-loving countries. The unstoppable advance of digitisation will create a nation of winners and losers, of skilled-up knowledge workers and the digitally dispossessed, leading to everyday dysfunction and civil unrest. And then there’s the argument that Australia sits at the forefront of the dire effects of an ever-worsening climate.

There’s much to be concerned about, and even more to do in order to mitigate these risks. And yet amid the disaster scenarios, I wonder if there’s another pathway through the 2020s. What if the effects of recent trade troubles encouraged the boards of Australia’s biggest businesses to build alternative supply chains, to re-shore the manufacturing process, to invest in local skills centres? And what if the skills shortage encouraged governments to target skilled immigrants and create fast-track methods of approving visa and permanent resident applications? We can be – should be – world’s best practice at skills verification and attraction.

Maybe Australians aren’t intimidated by the sabre-rattling of pitiful bullies. Maybe such threats will have the opposite effect, galvanising a nation determined to protect its sovereignty over the continent, its resources and its peaceable people. Maybe the digitisation process transforming the workplace will release humanity from the drudgery of repetitive work, enabling workers to pursue more humanistic endeavours based around care, artistry and business creation. There could even be an outbreak of personal fulfilment in the workplace by the end of the decade!

Climate issues will continue to plague the planet in the 2020s but what if the great Australian wheatbelt and our grazing lands continue to thrive? Australian agribusiness can use this decade to upscale, further corporatise and snap up enterprises (including abattoirs, refineries, mills, canneries and dairies) in the rural heartland of other nations. In my vision of the future, by the mid-2030s Australia has the world’s largest mining company as well as one of the world’s largest listed agribusiness companies.

Any why not give our island continent, the world’s 13th largest economy, a stronger naval boat-building capability? We should have far greater engineering capabilities. After all it is Australia’s largest cities, not Europe’s or Japan’s, that are projected to add three million to a base of five million by the mid-2050s.

Why is this outlook credible? Because in a global war for talent and skills, our quality of life will win out. We offer the opportunity to work and study in cosmopolitan “safe” cities that celebrate immigrant cultures. And we have a critical mass of people from pretty much everywhere.

We don’t take kindly to being threatened. And sometimes we need a bit of a nudge to step off our safe quality-of-life trajectory to rethink where we are and where we’re going. We did this after World War II with large-scale immigration and industrialisation. The 2020s could result in a far stronger, more skilled, more diverse Australia.

Let us use this decade of change and unification in the face of egregious threats to focus on the kind of supportive, skilled society we want to bequeath to the next generation of Australians. That outrageously ambitious aspiration should not be just for ourselves, but for those who follow.