Curmudgeon,

Yabby is right, Many of the skills are simply not available in Aus. Top engineers with their LOA etc cost easily $400k+ The miners and big companies are not paying this to deny locals employment. The cost of employing a local without the requisite know how will cost the company much more.

A figure I was given was that employing one professional creates work for up to 4 lower skilled employees.

Shadow Minister and Yabby - I have no doubt that what you write in the more reasoned second posts is true, but you are still left with the issue that if the companies concerned want those specialised LPG skills then they have to pay.. They can't or shouldn't use the immigration quotas as a way to get labor more cheaply, although that isn't going to happen anyway. They have to train the labour up themselves, and then pay them enough to retain them, and/or pay attract the staff they want.. in essense it was all the article really said.. if big companies want those skilled staff then they should get out their chequebooks..

In October last year a group of Chinese workers were paid less than $2 an hour tto dismantle the former Mitsubishi car plant in Adelaide.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/07/18/2956996.htm?section=justin

I think that is one reason to stop or at least evaluate more carefully the issue of bringing in skilled workers - often it is a scam.

Australia needs to be doing more to skill its own people.

Curmudgeon,

How do you train someone with a decade's experience to be available in the next few months.

You cannot get a baby in one month by making 9 women pregnant.

The reason experienced professionals are paid many times more than graduates is because they are worth it. Years of experience cannot be achieved by a few months of Tafe.

Thanks for ideas and comments everyone.

I wrote this article with the express intent of highlighting another angle to the debate on skilled labour shortages, and the commonly proposed solution of increasing quotas of skilled migrants.

I tried to highlight a few interrelated and often ignored parts of the issue:
1. That highly skilled labour is extremely mobile and thus wages must be competitive not just domestically, but internationally.

2. Those who invest in education, and put in the hard yards for some years afterwards, need a return on their education and training investment. It needs to be obvious to young professionals that there are rewards for following that path. Any industry or skill singled out in immigration quotas due to 'demand', will face the problem of increased competition for wages, thus reducing the returns to education in that area.

3. For some specialist skills (especially those mentioned, such as large energy projects) governments can do little to help train people in this respect. Hypothetically, if there are 20 LNG (or other specialist large scale engineering) projects worldwide, and those companies in the industry wish to expand to 50 projects, where do they think they will acquire people with experience?

The only sources of work experience are their own existing projects.

Thus these industries need to look after their own growth and demand for skills. As Yabby mentioned "it doesn't matter what you pay them, if these people aren't there, they aren't there" - this applies globally. Government intervention through changes to immigration laws, even investment in education, cannot change this fact.

Continued in next comment...

4. Every country in the world has argued that there are skills shortages for many many years. Just google skills shortage + any country and you will find thousands of articles across many years.

5. Arguing for increased skilled migration is a way for businesses to get highly skilled people for less that what the market wage would be if they only had access to domestically trained people. This then simple reinforces the 'brain drain' exodus. You need to pay to get them back.

Anyway, it has been an interesting discussion.