The Business Council of Australia (BCA) is the leading business group for the nation. Over the years they have provided innovative and challenging research papers for the community to ponder. Never more so than their latest effort. It lays out a cogent and well argued case for national regulation in infrastructure development. It supports the current federal government's concern to achieve a truly national outcome in this policy arena.
Yet, where are the people? It's like the old cry "what about the workers?" all over again. The massive spend on bricks and mortar requires a while new range of skilled people, in new locations, doing new things. It should not be possible to produce a paper on buidling physical capability in Australia without including a core section on workforce planning and skills.
The BCA paper talks about economic, social and environmental issues, but the only reference to people issues is a throw away line half way through the Report about needing better skills to plan the submissions for the spending grants. What about the skilled people needed to plan, design, construct, operate and maintain the assets being built - for the whole of life of those assets?
The more "dry" policy commentators would no doubt say that "the market will sort it out". Labour and skills are a secondary concern to those would focus on roads, railway lines, ports, fibre optics and multi modal terminals. Yet we know from our own History that failure to integrate workforce planning with infrastructure spend leads to delays, cost overruns, failure to perform to specification and increased reliance on untested and imported workers.
If we can devote serious policy to developing and supporting a domestic auto industry, and planning for major cities 50 years from now, why can't we have a domestic manpower planning and skills strategy to provide Australians with access to training, jobs, re-training, re-deployment and terms and conditions of employment that encourage local workfroce development - for 100 years into the future?
It takes time to train skilled workers - up to ten years for professionals with on-the-job experience. You can't just "flick a switch" and recruit the appropriate skill sets from the pool of unemployed workers. Apart form the sheer size of the labour requirements in the coming two decades, the mix of skills is just not there in a range of occupations: rail signal engineers, license aircraft maintenance engineers, IT specialists, project managers, train drivers, long distance road transport operators....the list goes on and on.
For every major infrastucture spend over $100 million, there should be a Skills Impact Study for the life of the asset; and a national Infrastructure Skills Fund should be set up to work with industry and government to plan for labour requirements and develop strategies to meet our skills needs of the next 50 years at least. Now that would be real strategic planning!