Infrastructure Australia sounds alarm over skilled workforce shortfalls

A new report from Infrastructure Australia suggests the country faces a shortfall of 300,000 skilled construction workers by 2027.

Transcript

00:00The major skills gaps that we've identified is around architects, planners, engineers,

00:08but mostly just general construction labourers.

00:10So we need to look at a range of different ways to attract more people into the pipeline,

00:15so migration settings is part of that, training is part of that, making sure that people are

00:19paid appropriately, but also making sure that we're focusing on the culture of the construction

00:24industry so that when people come into the sector that they actually want to stay and

00:27work for a decent amount of time.

00:29There's been a great deal of focus on this from the Australian Government over recent

00:34years.

00:35So there was the creation of Jobs and Skills Australia, there was the creation of the Jobs

00:38and Skills Councils like Build Skills which focuses on the construction industry and Power

00:43Skills which focuses on electricity, but the simple fact of the matter is that we will need

00:49to have a range of different policy levers being pulled and that will include migration settings,

00:54it will include training people up and it will include, as I said, using different ways of

00:58delivering infrastructure than perhaps we traditionally have.

01:01There are some almost doubling or if not more in the regions in terms of demand for skilled

01:08labour and a lot of that is about the change in the way in which the pipeline is constructed

01:13now with that big focus on renewable energy.

01:16A lot of those generation sites are in regional areas, a lot of those transmission sites are in

01:21regional areas.

01:22So that is a challenge to get people out to those locations, which is why we are calling

01:27for a focus on things like offsite construction where you can construct major parts of the

01:31infrastructure and then assemble on site a lot more quickly.

01:34When you look at a sector like manufacturing, they've had a substantial increase in their productivity

01:40over the last 30 years.

01:42There's a range of things we need to look at.

01:45One is just the way in which the market is structured in infrastructure and construction.

01:50So there's a lot of very, very small businesses, a lot of small subcontracting businesses, which

01:55can mean that there's lower productivity because they don't invest as much into their business

01:59as a big business.

02:00But we think that there's some real opportunities on the table through better use of digital

02:05rehearsals, better use of planning digitally, better use of modern methods of construction.

02:10There are examples right around the country, particularly in housing, of small pilots that

02:14are occurring where people or governments are delivering far more housing infrastructure

02:19than they have in the past using modern methods of construction, using robotics to do major

02:24parts of the manufacturing.

02:25So we think there's a need to take some of those small pilots and scale it up at a

02:30national level and create the volume to deliver more housing more quickly and more infrastructure

02:34more quickly.