A view on the summit

The summit comes after the Western Australian government established its own taskforce to deliver on an election commitment of 125,000 new jobs by 2025-26 through industry diversification, training, regional jobs growth, Aboriginal employment, and reducing the scale of WA’s interstate fly-in, fly-out workforce.

The national summit is intended to set out the federal government’s stall in addressing Australia’s chronic skills shortages and meeting the challenge of filling a record 420,000 job vacancies, according to data released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

From the agenda that has just been released, the summit will focus on addressing skills shortages, boosting productivity, delivering sustainable wages growth, improving migration settings and extending employment opportunities to disadvantaged groups.

The summit will also consider how Australia can best capitalise on job opportunities and value creation afforded by renewable energy technologies, climate change mitigation and manufacturing.

But which of these considerations are most relevant to WA? Short-term skills shortages have been especially severe for WA’s businesses over the course of the transition through the COVID pandemic, and risk holding back the state’s economic recovery.

Interstate and overseas migration has been an indispensable part of the state’s economic growth story for decades, at least until the pandemic shut off this channel of labour market adjustment.

There is compelling evidence, including recent research from Bankwest Curtin Economics Centre, to show that skilled migrants raise productivity, increase participation and contribute directly to Australia’s economic growth.

This narrative is too often clouded by claims that migrants take jobs away from local workers. However, this claim just doesn’t stack up.

The benefits of a flexible and well-targeted skilled migration program extend to all workers through improved career progression and real wages growth.

What’s important is to ensure that migrant workers can match effectively to skills that are in high demand but short supply.

And another important, but all too often overlooked, response to skills shortages comes from our ability (or not) to match the right people to the right job, in the right location.

We can do a lot better to ensure that workers can connect efficiently with jobs across industry sectors and in local areas with high demand, with minimal barriers to relocation.

The new WA Skilled Migrant Employment Register launched this month by Premier Mark McGowan is to be welcomed, and it’s hoped this will combine with other initiatives to ease the flow of skilled workers to this state.

It is imperative that visa pathways are identified and processed efficiently, and that the skills of migrant workers are adequately recognised by federal and state governments and industry.

Skills shortages can be mitigated if we’re better able to match the skills and talents of workers to jobs.

We can go a long way to improving skills utilisation by breaking down gendered segregation of jobs, or gendered barriers to career progression, across industry sectors, and by removing barriers to participation through a lack of affordable childcare.

And maximising the potential of underutilised skills among those who have withdrawn from the labour market through a lack of opportunity, or whose current jobs may not reflect their skills and qualifications, must be part of the solution.

• Professor Alan Duncan is director of the Bankwest Curtin Economics Centre.