9 November

Another way to look at Australia’s problems, through the lens of engineering. The largest countries in the world graduate more engineers every year than Australia graduates students in ALL fields. Yes they’re much bigger populations, but per capita most of them are training 10 times as many engineers as we are. (And it’s even worse than that, because many engineers we’re training are coming from overseas.) In a nutshell, Australia doesn’t build big things any more. It’s a giant quarry, mostly. Have a look at the graph, where we make our money. That leaves it dangerously exposed. Australia is also very short of tradespeople, but when you look at the work shortage areas, the majority are in construction i.e. housing and other buildings. Australia doesn’t need more houses or more renovated houses, that’s been our one-trick asset bubble pony to try to make quick money. The Block is our national economy. We need a manufacturing industry again. Remember when we used to build cars, before Tony Abbott destroyed the industry? Now Australians wait 12-18 months to buy a new car, at the arse-end of the queue, from overseas manufacturers. We need our trades working on massive nation-building projects, not just Block-like housing renovations. New power stations and grids. New water engineering. Massive climate mitigation engineering. Retrofitting all of our buildings with proper ventilation to stop pandemics. Etc. How did this all happen? We spent most of the past 30 years with governments who refused to invest in Australia. They saw that as ‘government spending’, their nightmare. They thought giving us all tax cuts and low wages would force us to rise up and spontaneously start building new train lines, new power stations and power grids. The whole idea is so ridiculous it’s still amazing people bought it. And so here we are, a giant quarry. Like a third world nation, supplying mining raw materials to rich countries, who build things with them.