I am a skilled Australian; I completed a mechanical engineering degree hons and faced nothing but long-term unemployment for the last 10 years. Every agency/employer I went to said the same thing sorry markets down, or you need 5-10 years experience. Everything is made in china.

If trades were that good people would do them. The truth is they do not offer long-term stability. You may do well transiently, but it is too easy for a government to flood the market. You are typically self-employed and so are a second-class citizen e.g. no doc’s home loan.

Farmers complain that they can’t get fruit pickers. Bu all that means is that people don’t want their fruit. What it means is that the farmer cannot pay the picker enough from an alternative job to make a profit from the produce when sold to the market. We need to stop supporting rural areas, which make up only 3% of GDP and destroy our country by taking 50% of the water! Farmers and rural areas are near useless.

Science degrees are near useless. Scientists struggle to get a job, get low pay and are not understood or reconised in a sports crazy nation. I saw an article about an Australian graduate scientist of the year forced onto unemployment because there were no job opportunities.

We have witnesses the downfall of it, as this is outsourced to countries where virtual slave labor is allowed. Accountancy is being outsourced (good).

The only degrees worth while are medicine and law. that’s it. I think everyone should have the option of doing any degree they want. Law should almost be mandatory so that each individual can assert his or her rights. This would stop governments and others kicking people around.

Jenny Has made some good points but she is after all is said and done a polly and if her party where in power she would most likely be saying the same things as Brendan I've never vote liberal in my life Nelson. I actually don't think there is a skills shortage more a shortage of people willing to work in those areas many of which once worked into them. The various governments and pressure groups need to look at the real value of these workers. Much work needs to be done by these same groups to show that the around 80% of young people that don't go to uni are not failures. After all sanitation and clean water saves more lives then doctors do.

Lastly I want to know why GARY HARDGRAVE MP the Minister for Vocational and Technical Education is posting under the name Suzanne mmm and if he is a tradesmen?

I must confess to being confused about the connection between twenty thousand young people not getting to University and the shortage of science graduates.

Were those twenty thousand all denied places on science courses. Well I suppose the inference is clear, from Jenny's point of view they must have been. However, personally I suspect that many of those twenty thousand were denied the opportunity to study Tourism at Wup Wup College of TAFE, or maybe even Chinese Traditional Medicine in Footscray—a VCE in science probably not required, but an affinity with crystals and a willingness to suspend scepticism definitely desirable.

If those twenty thousand were at the bottom end of the VCE feeding chain then them not getting a University place may actually be regarded as a mercy. Science after all does take some mathematical ability and simply creating the university place does not necessarily create the people with the necessary ability to fill those places.

The Howard government seems to have the inclination to make a university education just a little bit more exclusive; and with luck we may even see a reduction in the number of tourism and vocational courses currently on offer, hopefully to the benefit of the more scientifically inclined disciplines. Hip hop and Chinese Medicine our great fun but they probably don't belong in a university.

A complex issue no doubt.

Why do we pay sportspeople and other entertainers more than scientists?

How do we get the balance right to help tradespeople have the flexibility others have - how hard is it for a tradesperson to start late to drop the kids to school or do the other things parents do?

How do we get someone to start down a career path that tops out at "low income" when many professionals make multiples of a tradespersons income doing much easier and safer jobs?

No answers here but personally I think a good scientist is worth a lot more to Australia than a footballer or cricket player.

When I arrived in this country 25 years ago it took less than six months for me to start asking "Does Australia not manufacture anything here anymore?" because there were so many everyday items with "Made in China" labels. Even than I knew that this day HAD to arrive, despite assurances from my new Australian associates that "Don't worry mate, THIS is Australia, WE are different, we KNOW what we are doing".

With our trade deficit off the charts, does anyone mind if I now respond with, "Is that right...?"

Then, twenty years ago, as an employer, I said, "Given the attitudes with which young Australians are now being raised, we will have a crisis in employment one day."

I also said we would have "carnage" on our roads because of their selfish, rude and arrogant attitudes--but in those days we didn't know the term "road-rage".

Today we face a disastrous shortage of 'ordinary' working people-especially in the trades and manufacturing. Even than I knew that this day HAD to arrive, despite assurances from my new Australian associates that "Don't worry mate, THIS is Australia, we are different, we KNOW what we are doing".

(It almost appears that) half our young people, who WOULD HAVE been those 'workers' had they been properly educated and raised, are endlessly high on drugs or drunk every night and the other half are ferals who are on the dole and grossly uneducated. Does anyone mind if I now respond with, "Is that right...?"

Don't blame the politicians---blame the liberal thinkers who threw out discipline and 'old-fashioned' ideas such as personal responsibility and diligence.

It's been a great party, people. Party time is over and now it's time to pay. Except we don't have the dough. Tell me again, what was that you said about being "Different" and "special"?

Education is a nice safe target for any politician not in power, and this article follows the normal pattern. It is always possible to find something about education that isn't working, but this is just a way to avoid thinking through the real issues.

Shortly after WWII, "Made in Germany" and "Made in Japan" were bywords for "cheap". Spain was in the sixties little more than a cheap holiday destination. China, until quite recently, was a closed economy with little by way of international trade, now it is becoming a key market for both imports and exports.

These shifts happen all the time, and inevitably change the requirements for education. We trust our politicians to guide us through the various stages with the minimum of fuss, but unfortunately they tend to abdicate this responsibility in favour of short-termism. What, they should be asking, is Australia's role in the world economy over the next thirty to fifty years? What is it that we have that the world will continue to pay us for in the coming years?

Any answers on "what do we do about education" should follow the answers to the above. However, we all know it is not going to happen. Politicians think in terms of being elected or re-elected, just as business thinks in terms of how much profit it can squeeze from your and my pocket before the next balance sheet is due at the end of the next quarter.

There's another even more insidious side to this which is the myth that "the market" will solve the problem. The market is the problem.