Jobs and Skills Summit to grapple with paradigm shift in employment: Stephen Jones

The summit, held over the past two days, was originally conceived by the Albanese government in opposition during the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, when jobs shortages were at their worst.

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Now, by the time the summit kicked off, Australia has the lowest unemployment in the past 50 years and skills shortages in every sector.

Mr Jones said current low unemployment would last the best part of the next decade and that the focus of the summit was to find the workers needed to fill in the gaps.

To do this, announcements targeted underutilised sectors of the workforce, including fee-free TAFE places, changing pension rules to encourage older workers back into the workforce and increasing the permanent migration intake to bring in workers from overseas.

Despite low unemployment, many workers' wages have not risen, and Mr Jones said changes to industrial relations rules would begin to address this.

Much of this, however, was the work of Mr Jones and others in the background, so it was the speeches of those not in the policy room that stood out, including paralympian Dylan Alcott and Grattan Institute executive Danielle Wood, who compared the attention governments give underground resources to that it gives 50 per cent of the population.

"I can't help reflect that if untapped women's workforce participation was a massive iron ore deposit, we would have governments falling over themselves to give subsidies to get it out of the ground," Ms Wood said.

Mr Jones said this galvanised the room to action.

"We have employers large and small saying, 'As a result of this discussion, we're gonna go work out how we can change our approach to employing people with disabilities.'"

With all in the room aware of the scale of the task ahead, Mr Jones said the summit was a step towards a more collaborative approach.

"The thing that surprised me was the goodwill of everybody in the room, no matter where they came from, to say, 'We've got some big challenges, we're gonna have to put our traditional differences aside and try and work together.'"

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