Investing in ourselves

We need to think more about how we manage the investment in our people by focusing on the values underlying policies and actions.

We need to engage our best business, community and political leaders and thinkers in a dialogue to find and implement solutions to the challenge of investing in people facing the future of Australian society and Queensland.

We need to address the static workforce and growing numbers of people on pensions and benefits.

The ABS (2006) estimates that children born in 2004 will live two to three years longer than those born 10 years earlier. In fact, the life expectancy of Australians is the fifth highest of all OECD members.

As per the Intergenerational Report 2006, we need to build capacity through mentoring and support of a new workforce of emerging policy-makers and academics to develop skills and public policy understanding.

However, we're not sure this last point will be universally seen as an answer to the presumed skills crisis, except by the relatively few people who may stand to benefit.

It might be useful to draw an analogy with carbon trading credits. The comparison goes something like this:

• Carbon: Everyone agrees we can't continue pumping carbon into the atmosphere, therefore the external costs of carbon must be sheeted home to the users.
• Training: Everyone agrees our workforce is failing to acquire and reacquire the skills they need, therefore the external benefits of training must be recognised and sheeted home to the beneficiaries.
   
• Carbon: Carbon trading scheme established wherein every business has entitlement from the government to X amount of carbon credits per year or tax paid on excess carbon produced.
• Training: Tax rebate of $X per year entitlement established for every worker, offset by training levy of same $X per year per worker on all firms.
   
• Carbon: Firms that need more credits have to buy them in the carbon trading market; firms that don't need as many can sell theirs to those who need them.
• Training: Firms can offset their levy by either spending to train their workers and/or by hiring workers who have already spent their own training credit that year.
   
• Carbon: As the price of carbon credits rises, firms make changes to their production processes to produce less carbon.
• Training: Workers who use their training credits to get training become competitive in the market for jobs because they can bring a financial benefit to a firm hiring them. Workers seek out firms which will provide training because they can get an extra rebate for the training spent on them that year by the firm.

We are not sure how the sums work out for Treasury (probably pretty expensive, but hey, one way or another more money needs to be spent on training overall).

The point we want to make is that just as there appears to be a public benefit from creating a market mechanism to achieve a public good (or in the case of carbon, reduce a public harm), then there may be benefit in seeing whether or not we might be able to create a market mechanism to invest more in skills and reward training.

What the model above attempts to do is to create a favourable market for workers with training as opposed to workers without it. The time to receive and give training is currently a problem for workers and employers. This approach will go some way towards creating a favourable mindset on the part of workers and employers for spending some time and money on training every worker every year.

We appreciate of course that training is a most imperfect surrogate for the acquisition of wisdom, but to date the accurate measurement of wisdom has eluded us.