Sustaining Australia’s
great resources opportunity
It is more important than ever to ensure that
Australia continues to be seen as a great place to invest
and work. International corporations have many options
as to where to invest their money, and the warning signs
are well and truly here that Australia’s resource industry
needs to be treated with greater respect and not be taken
for granted as a cash cow.
The greatest challenges for our industry come
from the cost of doing business in Australia. Australia
is currently one of the most expensive places in the
world to do business. The
Global Competitiveness Report
2012-13
produced by the World Economic Forum in
September ranked Australia 20th in terms of global
competitiveness. The survey data revealed, among other
things, a heightened awareness by business about a
deteriorating workplace relations environment and
inefficient government bureaucracies.
We need to ensure that our national legislation
and regulation, including our industrial relations
framework, are creating more efficiencies around labour
and project agreements and do not continue to impede
our national interest.
Australia’s workplace relations laws have their part
to play. While unions and workers want a piece of the
pie while the going is good, the fact is that unless some
restraint is shown in the level of wage and condition
claims, the pie will shrink, if not disappear entirely.
Earlier this year industry was hopeful of some
positive reforms to our workplace relations framework
that would address the escalating pressures and costs
of employing people. At this stage it would appear the
outcomes from the Fair Work Act Review process won’t
have any such upside.
The skills shortages facing our employers are also
reaching unforeseen levels. Employment growth has
nearly tripled the predictions of the National Resources
Sector Employment Taskforce (NRSET) from June 2010
and therefore the extent of the skills shortage will also
far exceed estimates.
Nonetheless, our industry’s
employers continue to innovate
in the areas of workforce
management and push through
these challenges.
As a national employer group,
it is AMMA’s role to facilitate the
rapid evolution of our workforce
practices and we are working to
implement a range of detailed
workforce development and planning strategies.
The AMMA Skills Connect initiative is an alliance
model where other industry groups have partnered with
us to support the delivery of specialised training and
development programs to a wide range of workers. These
specialised skills will not only be an asset for resource
industry employers, but will give these Australian
workers a highly adaptable set of technical abilities
that can be easily transferred to a broad range of other
business sectors. Such a program demonstrates the
resource industry’s commitment to facilitating a highly
skilled and mobile Australian workforce.
Our industry remains on track to create hundreds of
thousands of jobs, and hundreds of billions of dollars of
economic growth. But only if the government removes
the unwarranted impediments to doing business that
currently exist.
The future of our industry needs to shift away from
the focus on the distribution of wealth and move towards
a more astute awareness of our position in a very
competitive global marketplace.
AMMA calls on the federal government to work
with business, and help our great resource industry
withstand the current economic challenges by making
our domestic environment as supportive and efficient
as possible in the national interest. With such a focus
there will be hope that we can translate policy outcomes
into arrangements that encourage, not discourage,
investment and well-paid jobs.
Left: ‘FMG’s Anderson Point
Wharf’ by Simon Phelps
Below: ‘The Look Out’
by Simon Phelps
MINESITE 2012
15