If we want to increase the job opportunities for young school leavers, we need to reincorporate compulsory service. You know, being obliged to retire early and rise even earlier; to develop self reliance, personal responsibility, some reasonable conformity and team work!

And also expose them to some very relevant work experience and helpful networks as part of the same experience!

We also need to claw back our own economic sovereignty, and the repatriated profits, that the fire sale of that item is taking from us, and indeed, the huge additional economic activity, that money could create, if left to circulate around and through our own economy, before being permanently lost elsewhere.

We need to once again become a country that makes things, as not everybody, can be a uni graduate or service provider.
Very few services can be exported!

What we need is a government, that actually understands energy and capital's roles, and creates policies that bring down the cost of both.
Energy is something we have an overabundance of.

Capital, well that's a little more difficult, given the big four are mostly owned by foreign equity firms/hedge funds?

And, we have studiously avoided using thirty year self terminating bonds; or, can't seem to sell our energy resources fast enough, or worse, leave those with the lowest carbon footprint or extraction costs, in the ground, or as capital creating equity/mineral banks, for foreign investors?

Were we to adopt some form of social credit, to allow us to finance our own resource extraction, infrastructure requirements, and our own energy resources, we wouldn't be totally dependent on the whim and caprice of foreign firms and or foreign capital; just to get some of this done!

Nor would we be required to further grow, a foreign debt burden, that's already at record, stratospheric levels!
I've read some numbers, that equate our own private sector, (Foreign) debt, with China's total foreign exchange reserves!
And whether we chose to acknowledge it or not, are forced to pay a premium, just to service a debt burden that arguably belongs to someone else, somewhere else?
Rhrosty.

If we want to increase the job opportunities for young school leavers,
Rhosty,
We'd better get them to learn chinese so they can work for Australian bosses in chinese sweat shops because with the education they get here they haven't a hope in hell to do any other work.
Plus all those oldies will be taken all the jobs if they have to work to 70.

Certainly jobs are not everything but without one, forget about a life. Marriage not a hope, kids (see marriage), a nice place to live (cardboard box), and etc.

Only someone totally removed from hard times could spout such drivel, allow real jobs to be created and then all the rest is easy. Real jobs, not some Green fallacy.

‘morning Jan,

As a former employer of the products of our education systems, I can relate to some but not all your perspectives. We hired from both tertiary and university systems across a wide range of disciplines for roles in technical, scientific, marketing and management positions.

Tertiary education systems were typically easier to deal with due to the fact that skill bases were easier to define as a requirement and easier to test in candidates.

University education in the last thirty years has been and still remains a problem for many employers. There is nothing new in the dialogue between employers, students and faculties, it has been going on for decades however, for most of us in management this was a tokenistic process to get the best of the bunch from what was available. So don’t get too excited about the current “dialogue” you are encouraging.

From 1984 we recruited almost exclusively from universities, a corporate mandate. We visited universities, gave presentations to academia and students and conducted interviews.

Our entire participating management team came to the conclusion over many years that the biggest problem and obstacle for students was academia. We were never left in any doubt that our intrusions were “tolerated”, academia was never able to disguise their utter distain for the capitalist inspired industrialization and exploitation of their darling charges.

We devised a ploy to increase buy-in from academia. We actually got them to agree to be interviewed as “candidates” in order that they “might be better informed” of industrial needs. We never found any that were employable in the “outside world” or even understood what that was.

Cont’d

Cont’d

We tried our very best to impart our needs for basics, reading, writing, comprehension, history, geography, science and maths plus the domain specific disciplines as minimum requirements.

It is these basic tools that industry needs to train employees in the disciplines they need now and the flexibility to mould them with additional skills into new and ever changing needs. Thus industry is able to provide new challenges, new opportunities, rewarding careers.

Knowledge, skills, adaptability, creativity, collaboration, innovation, communication and digital literacy should not be the primary domain of education, they belong to industry and commerce. If students have not gained these as a by-product of their education they are already doomed.

If you need any more confirmation that you and your organization are so far removed from industrial and educational reality, just re-read your perspective on what you perceive as the “broader challenge”;

<< to equip young people to lead a society in which we sustain our standard of living, enhance our quality of life, protect our fragile environment, contribute to the global family and become a lighthouse nation to the world.>>

What a load of socialized, dangerous, misguided tosh. It is this nonsense that is making more and more graduates not only unemployed but unemployable.

They need rewarding careers and industry will provide them. The education system needs to immediately stop producing what “it” thinks is needed.

Employers need a well crafted product ready for stress testing, not a set of operating instructions and a social lecture.

Your naïveté has made you part of the problem

This is one of those rare occasions I find myself agreeing with spindoc, and real world experience!
One of the problems of absolute lack of practical real world experience, is that it becomes a profound problem, if it then transfers, via the aging process, and promotions for political candidates; into future leaders.
One classic example of this manifesting?
We now import 91% of our liquid fuel requirements, and at a cost to us and our economy, of 26+ billions P.A.
All while we have billions of barrels of much cleaner superior fuel types beneath our virtual feet!
[Perhaps more than the entire Middle East?]
And that same fuel, from wellhead to harvester, produces four times less total carbon!
And we can expect a plethora of fossil fuel executives, alias green advocates etc/etc, to come up with some marvelously creative excuses for the current status quo, or just not touching what we own!?
People not welded to insane green policies, or fossil fuel funding/salaries/consultancy fees, or have just had a modicum of real world experience, would reinstate our own oil and gas corporation, and just crack on, getting our own fuel into our own bowsers!
If that added billions to the budget bottom line, how exactly would that hurt us, or youth job creation?
And given average extraction costs down around $3.00 a barrel, for far less than we are currently paying price gouging foreigners at the bowser!
Were we to develop more of our own energy resources ourselves, and in a more timely manner, we could ramp up local employment opportunities, and even make room in that, for 70 year olds, who would just be employed as mentors, for youngsters, who just need, the getting of wisdom.
Local industry/business, just needs access to much cheaper energy, to start growing their businesses and job opportunities!
It's not them or us, but we!
If only we had someone with the experience and wisdom of spindoc running the country, we'd likely as not, not needing to be having this conversation?
Rhrosty.