Rewiring the nation won’t happen by rewriting history. Markets work best through light regulation and promoting competition. Government has a role to ensure important social outcomes where profits are scarce. But Labor’s energy transition is all about government control. Whether we agree with a government-led renewables future or not, one thing is clear: skills are not keeping up with demand. Australia is going it alone without nuclear, and Energy Minister Chris Bowen’s homemade recipe for an energy debacle is in full swing.
Despite Bowen talking up thousands of jobs created by coastal wind farms and other ‘green’ initiatives, the skilled workers needed to make the dream a reality will have to come from somewhere else. With immigration already putting pressure on the housing sector and infrastructure, Australia’s misguided energy transition stems from Labor’s belief that the government can do anything and everything. Clearly, it cannot.
A similar problem arose during the development of the National Broadband Network. Skills could not keep up with demand with many skilled workers simply moving from one firm to another in a case of ‘robbing Peter to pay Paul’. Such approaches do little to develop a sustainable skills base for industry and typically result in bloated bureaucracies focused on political issues rather than efficiency and competition.
One solution is for universities and tertiary education providers to read the market and offer courses that provide the necessary skills. This means getting out to factories, operators, and other employers and seeing the market from an industry perspective. Unfortunately, with the Albanese government moving the tertiary skills sector away from a market-based system, skills outcomes will likely focus on inputs from the government rather than outputs that benefit industry.
I have observed numerous transport, telecommunications, and energy operators throughout Europe and Asia recently and it is clear that the skills needed to ‘green’ these industries are not as easy to identify as one might expect. For example, a major impediment to smaller telecommunications companies in Australia in the early 2000s was not phones or infrastructure but creating a billing system. Many software developments from that era remain in place at present, but these relied on a small cadre of passionate programmers and operators who made the systems work.
In Australia today, advanced welding robots can be seen sitting idle after a hardware upgrade. Advanced manufacturers require their own software developers to reconfigure the software after minor hardware changes. One could be forgiven for thinking that the manufacturers of the robots would do this as part of the deal, but that is not always the case.
When dreaming about a green revolution, one might imagine electricians, hydrographers, crane operators, meteorological experts, and other scientists as key personnel. But the reality is much less obvious.
Despite a major push by the government and universities to focus on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) courses, there were no jobs for graduates. Instead, the small number of software developers working with advanced manufacturers in Australia quickly found their way to the US or elsewhere.
The ‘brain drain’ is a major problem for Australia. If the coastal wind farms off the East Coast are to create some 16,000 jobs, where will the skilled workers come from? Australia is not alone in its move to renewables and any influx of skilled workers from overseas can only drive up wages in the sector, impacting upon increasing costs driven by inflation.
Other issues that are not prominent in our education and skills sectors are resource recovery operations for the plethora of batteries that will be needed to make the electrification project work. Moreover, the mining industry will grow, and operations will become more complex as the focus shifts from coal to rare earths and other minerals. Again, specialist skills will be required, and not just engineers and scientists.
Many involved in the higher education and skills sectors will be conscious of the disconnect between training and industry. There will always be a place for researchers who help us understand abstract phenomena, but the future skills challenge is much more down to earth. And it was always blindingly obvious.
However, the Albanese government’s draft national research priorities move away from the previous focus on clear objectives in particular industry sectors towards what can only be described as platitudes. This is likely to result in more research focused on the morality of the environmental movement rather than applied research that actually benefits Australians in a practical sense.
The energy transition could have been encouraged by instead of dominated by government. A technologically neutral energy policy could have enabled competition to drive down prices and incentivise an appropriate skills-mix. Instead, the Albanese government is trying to control the market.
Anyone who doubts the inefficacy of government control need only visit the DDE Museum in Berlin. Despite its ideological focus on equality of outcome, the mass exodus following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 suggests that living the socialist dream is quite the nightmare.
A real understanding of history based on evidence rather than statue-toppling virtue-signalling demonstrates that government control stifles economies. For anyone unsure, it might be time for a detailed check of one’s household budget.
Like all ideologically driven policies that rely on consumer compliance rather than choice, Bowen’s homemade energy debacle was obvious from the get-go. Labor’s energy policy was always a recipe for disaster. With industry and now skills providers focused on gaining favour from the government rather than competing in the market, the proof is in the pudding.
