Post-virus skills focus
Australia tackles Covid-19 labour changes with retraining
CANBERRA: Prime Minister Scott Morrison has laid out his plans to reshape Australia’s post-coronavirus economy, saying improved job skills training will be essential for a changing labour market.
In a keynote speech to the National Press Club yesterday, Morrison called for an overhaul of vocational education so it is more responsive to business needs.
He also announced a new working group to discuss industrial relations reform over the next four months.
The prime minister signaled that huge fiscal support to help the economy through the Covid-19 crisis can’t continue indefinitely, but that the government will focus on resetting the economy for the next three to five years of growth.
Tax reform deregulation and cheaper energy prices are all part of Morrison’s agenda, but his speech focused on skills reform and workplace relations.
“We need Australians better trained for the jobs businesses are looking to create,” Morrison said. “We will all have to retrain to live and work in a way that creates a sustainable” economy and society amid the virus impact.
His government’s so-called Jobmaker programme, announced yesterday, will focus on linking education funding toward skills needed by businesses, simplifying higher-education systems to create more consistency between state jurisdictions, boosting funding transparency and better coordinating funding and subsidies.
As part of Morrison’s industrial relations reform agenda, attorney-general Christian Porter will lead a group of employers, industry groups, employee representatives and governments to look at award simplification, enterprising agreement-making, addressing benefits for casual and fixed-term employees and enforcement of the rules.
“The purpose is simple and honest: to explore and hopefully find a pathway to sensible, long-lasting reform, with just one goal – make jobs,” he said.
As an olive branch to the union movement, which he thanked in the speech for helping the government enact rapid stimulus policies during the coronavirus lockdown, Morrison said he was shelving the Ensuring Integrity Bill, which has yet to pass the Senate and was designed to crack down on union corruption.
Morrison is looking to reanimate large sections of the economy by July, when he plans for the states and territories to finish implementing a three-stage removal of most lockdown restrictions.
While the nation appears on track to record its first recession in almost three decades as unemployment surges, his government told taxpayers on Friday that it was A$60bil (Us$39bil) better off due to “significant errors” in its Jobkeeper programme, which pays employers a subsidy to keep workers employed.
Still, the prime minister is keen to stress that the government’s stimulus measures, which include a boost to welfare payments amounting to A$150bil over six months after the Jobkeeper revision, will need to expire later this year.
Morrison’s pro-business government is looking toward its annual budget, to be delivered in October instead of May due to the pandemic, to play “an important part” of his economic reset.
He said it will come amid “a historic deficit” and an economy hit by unemployment at about 10%, a fall of about one-third in the world’s trade and a 40% decline in global foreign direct investment.
While much of Morrison’s reset agenda remains vague beyond skills training and changes to industrial relations laws, the prime minister is ruling out building trade barriers.
“We will not retreat into the downward spiral of protectionism,” he said.
“To the contrary, we will continue to be part of global supply chains that can deliver the prosperity we rely on to create jobs, support incomes and build our businesses.”