For a moment, forget attracting global investment in building our future cities. Sadly, Victoria already has. Forget planning too.
The other key fault line in the future of Australian cities is finding the people to build them.
The Albanese government urgently needs to review its ban on fast tracking appropriately credentialed overseas tradies through the specialist skills pathway.
The government essentially says ‘you have to prove there is a worker shortage’ and ‘even if we welcome these overseas workers, lots of other countries are doing big builds so people probably won’t come anyway.’
The Opposition continues to throw shade on ‘big Australia’ when the problem is ‘tiny housing supply, driven by investment-repelling tax systems, key worker shortages and intergenerationally unresponsive planning systems.’
Only seven per cent of Australian visas annually go to people filling our skills gaps.
The 2023 Skills Priority List shows 36 per cent of occupations were in national shortage (332 out of 916), about five percentage points higher than 2022 (31 per cent of occupations).
This problem is acute in construction trades, project management, engineering and more broadly. Over the past 20 years, the ABS shows only 1.8 per cent of permanent migrants arrive were employed in construction trades.
Among many other experts, the Federal Government’s own planning agency, Infrastructure Australia, guestimates demand for up to 405,000 people across big builds, housing and energy infrastructure.
Great government policy on construction trades and skills training doesn’t fill that gap.
Neither side of Federal politics admit that intelligently managing down the total numbers of migrants is compatible with lifting the absolute intake of construction trades from dangerously low levels.
We deserve better and will be developing further research on this in coming months.
Future cities summit today
A joy today to open our terrific future cities summit. A great program led by terrific speakers.
Cannot. Wait.