Ed Husic (Chifley, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for the Digital Economy) Share this | Hansard source

I'd have to say, as I said in my contribution to the substantive debate on the Migration Amendment (Skilling Australians Fund) Bill 2017, the biggest challenge facing Australia's digital economy and our tech sector is access to talent. The skills shortage is the biggest issue confronting the digital economy in this country right now. And this is not a new thing. This is not something that has just occurred. This has been a problem for a while. We've even had the need for and the challenge as to skills stressed or highlighted in a report released just a few weeks ago: the report Australia 2030: prosperity through innovation, done by Innovation and Science Australia. I'm holding the report up just to show those opposite, because this report is going to be forgotten. It will join the many other reports that have been prepared in this country that talk about the need not only to promote innovation but also to do something about it—and those opposite like to equate innovation with report preparation but not actually do anything about it. This report says, in the executive summary:

Despite present fears about automation eradicating jobs, by 2030 a shortage of workers is a more likely problem than a shortage of jobs.

Another report, released in 2016 by the now Minister for Jobs and Innovation, Tomorrow's digitally enabled workforce,isgathering dust. No action is being taken to address skills requirements in this country. We can go back to 2013 and the ICT workforce study that highlighted the skills shortages affecting the digital economy sector—a massive issue.

Now we've had this situation, where there are not enough skills, last for years. We've seen cuts to schooling, vocational education and tertiary education. And what did the government do all of a sudden last year? They decided they were going to cut the only other avenue that the sector had. All of a sudden, out of the blue, without consultation, they cut the local sector's access to overseas talent to help meet its needs.

I noted the interjection by the member for Swan saying, 'You've never run a business!'—those opposite supposedly knowing what works in a business and what doesn't. Yet what happened when the local tech sector, Member for Swan, had the temerity to raise its concerns about the fact that the government's 457 changes will affect the tech sector? What happened? We had the Minister for Immigration, Peter Dutton, ask of one firm, Atlassian, which the assistant minister would be well aware of, in an interview:

How many young Australians are they employing? Are they going into schools looking for young kids to come and work in jobs? Are they employing mature aged workers …

One of the founders of that firm tweeted:

Wow... did I just get trolled by a govt minister as being un-Australian?

Atlassian, the firm which hires local graduates; Atlassian, which provides local scholarships; Atlassian, which actively hires Australians and is an unquestionable Australian success story was being trolled by the immigration minister because these changes brought in all of a sudden had caught the entire tech sector off-guard.

It is not good enough to not invest in local skills and local workers' ability to fill tech jobs, and then, all of a sudden, to clamp access to overseas talent. And bear in mind, too, with the tech sector, that they'll provide a lot of employment opportunity for locals, but they also actually need to blend in overseas talent. There will always be a degree of overseas hiring, because there are things that are being done in different parts of the world where you want to bring those skills in and wash them in with local talent to improve local business. That is going to be a reality. But those opposite made this sudden change.

I would be very interested to hear from the minister responsible: what has been done to listen to the concerns of the tech sector? The government say that they've been consulting with the tech sector and claim that they've been listening. I'd be very interested to hear what they have done in a tangible, concrete way (1) to recognise the concerns, and (2) to respond after this shambles that we have had to live through in the last year where the government said there wasn't a need for extra skills and that they had to reform 457s, then all of a sudden scrambled to respond. It's not good enough. The local sector deserves better treatment from those who supposedly—like the member for Swan suggests—'know business' better than we do and yet do all these terrible things to the Australian sector, Australian jobs and the ability to grow firms in this country.

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