Page 3502 - Week 11 - Wednesday, 21 September 2005
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mindful of the environmental impact and work to ensure that the city is environmentally sustainable. We also need to be mindful of the social impact with regard to housing affordability and quality of life for those living on the margins of the city.
The third misconception in Mr Mulcahy’s motion is that we need to import skilled workers to address the skills shortage. There have been warning signs of an increasing skills shortage for at least a decade. Governments at all levels have been urged to invest in training and education as a primary strategy, and to address issues in some growth sectors, such as community services, by improving wages, conditions and status. It is the failure of successive governments to take this advice and adopt a long-term view that has contributed to the problems we are experiencing now. We cannot afford to let this continue. It is time for immediate action to begin to address the skills shortage, but I am not convinced that skilled migration is the best solution.
I concur with Professor Sue Richardson from the National Institute of Labour Studies at Flinders University, who argues that simply boosting migrant numbers is a lazy approach. She instead suggests that employers have to take a longer-term perspective on the way they manage their work forces and the whole development towards what she calls “just in time labour”, where employees are engaged on a casual, part-time or contract basis and kept on for as long as it suits the employer. Once it no longer suits, these employees are fired. This is not conducive to an environment of mutual skills development by workers and their employers. There is much employers could do to change this approach and take a more holistic approach towards building a skilled and stable work force.
Professor Richardson and others have also argued that we have a great reservoir of skilled workers in our older workers, which is largely untapped by employers. The rate of retirement of older people—and I am now talking 55 to 65, which I do not think is very old—has been rising rapidly. These people have many skills but they are not attracted to a work force that requires them to work a 50-hour week under intense pressure. Other groups too are choosing not to work long hours in stressful positions, including people with children or caring responsibilities. We could do a lot to provide better support to these groups and create more flexible workplaces, to allow people to continue to develop skills, build a career and maintain a work/life balance.
Before we focus on attracting more skilled people to Canberra we should also ask what we can do to help the unemployed and underemployed to develop the skills we need and take their places in the work force in meaningful roles. Like other jurisdictions, there are subgroups of people in the ACT who have missed out on the benefits of economic growth and falling unemployment.
Creating positive perceptions: the one part of Mr Mulcahy’s motion I can wholly agree with is that it is important to overcome negative perceptions of Canberra as a place to work, live and do business. I think most of us feel very lucky to live in Canberra. Many of us have made a decision to live here because we know that we have benefits we would not have elsewhere. I think it is a shame, then, that negative perceptions tend to persist. It is important for us to promote more positive images. One way we might do this is by creating a socially and environmentally sustainable city that sets a new benchmark for Australian cities and gives our residents a reason to feel pride in this place.
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