As I’ve moved around Victoria meeting with businesses and community representatives in recent months, a shortage of skilled staff has emerged as the single biggest barrier to our post-pandemic recovery.

Whether it’s café owners who can’t find chefs or wait staff, builders who can’t find apprentices or TAFEs that can’t find enough teachers, businesses are telling us in no uncertain terms that the chronic worker shortage is their most pressing challenge.

Two years of border closures locked out skilled migrants, international students and other labour which has clearly had an impact. Other countries are ahead of us when it comes to welcoming skilled migrants back.

With a renewed spirit of cooperation under a new Federal Government, now is the ideal time to bring together business, unions, universities, TAFEs, the states and other key sectors to find solutions that will benefit us all for decades to come.

Rather than clinging to the past, we now have an opportunity to lay the foundations for our future. As the education state and a vital business and economic hub, Victoria’s perspective is crucial to addressing our nationwide skills and labour shortages.

It’s why we set up the Victoria Summit during the pandemic to bring together key stakeholders across the community. The end result was the Victoria Summit Playbook containing 189 actions under 10 key pillars.

We created a shared vision and ambition for our future, knowing that if COVID-19 taught us anything, it’s that we must continuously adapt as the world around us changes. We want Victoria to be the best place to live, learn, work and operate a business.

Indeed, the six months since we released the Playbook have only reinforced the urgent need for many of its key actions.  To do this, our leaders should focus on short, medium and long-term solutions.

They should immediately address the lack of available labour by maximising workforce participation. Government can incentivise mature people to work more hours without impacting their pension payments and improve and fund access to quality early childhood education to drive more female participation in the workforce.

We also need to speed up visa processing times and relax specific working conditions outlined in migrant worker visa so they can be employed in other areas as required. Government should reward international workers on temporary visas that are due to expire in the next 12 months with an automatic two-year extension that is rolled over and requires no application or fee.

We also need to ensure that appropriate prior education, qualifications, experience and skills of our migrant workers are recognised and provide more temporary humanitarian visa holders with permanent residency.

Medium term solutions include a national industrial relations system to give employers and employees consistency. We must support both business and employees, particularly given business account for 90 per cent of Australia’s jobs. Australia needs to continue to evolve our education and training system to provide knowledge, skills and competencies that people need in the labour force and their wider lives. 

This includes moving towards a focus on microcredentials so we can rapidly reskill and upskill the workforce as required and support small and medium sized businesses with advanced training so they can be strategic and look at new ways of doing business. 

In the longer term, we need to consider how we can foster entrepreneurship and access funds to create the companies of the future. How do we become global citizens and take advantage of new technologies as well as international business trends and market demands? The way we work is changing and companies are evolving quickly particularly with new entrants.

The pandemic has demonstrated the need to ensure we have a self-sufficient supply chain and we must remain resolute in addressing climate change.  The renewable energy sector requires a coordinated approach including proactive workforce development of skills specific to the sector.

Global uncertainty is likely to continue. The pandemic, the war in the Ukraine and ongoing tensions around Taiwan continue to show us that we need to be able to better cope with global disruption. We also need to be able to come together as one Australia and build sustainable solutions for the future.

The Jobs and Skills Summit is an opportunity to create better jobs that will benefit not just us but our children and their children. An opportunity to build a better Australia for generations to come. An opportunity to embrace our future now.

This op-ed originally appeared in the Herald Sun on Monday 22 August 2022