The jobs crisis is looming large in Australia’s construction sector and the need for overseas migration to deliver its pipeline has been deemed “a sad indictment” on the industry.
Dire industry forecasts indicate a crippling shortfall of tens of thousands of skilled and semi-skilled workers to fill jobs over the next few years.
And despite growth in the professional, trades and labour spaces—including a doubling of apprentice numbers this year—it is “still not enough”, industry experts have warned.
“Activity is good but the capability and the capacity of the sector to deliver is the big issue,” Master Builders Australia national policy director Alexandra Waldren said.
Speaking at The Urban Developer Property and Economic Outlook vSummit, she said the industry was battling a “Covid new-world order” of workforce shortages and inflationary cost pressures.
“We’re looking to the future and whether or not the situation is going to shift … but we’re not thinking it’s going to be shifting too soon,” Waldren said.
“We’re forecasting we’ll need 80,000 more people working in the professional space and a little less in the trades and labour space going forward over the next few years.
“Yes, we’ve seen growth—apprentice numbers have doubled this year. If that continued it would start to resolve some of these issues but it’s still not enough.”
Waldren said the pressures were being felt across the board and across the country at the moment but particularly in Western Australia where strict border rules are impacting domestic and international migration.
“It’s really starting to bite over there and they’ve got some big challenges going forward,” she said.
Sydney-based construction firm Roberts Co chief executive Alison Mirams said the whole industry has been effectively “trying to build with a workforce that is diminished”.
“We’ve got a lot of work on one hand and we’re trying to deliver on the other hand,” she said.
“The risk profile is the biggest I’ve seen in 20 years. The margins are the smallest I’ve seen in 20 years. And that’s not a good recipe for success.”
Mirams pointed to an Infrastructure Australia forecast that by mid-2023 there will be a shortfall in jobs being filled exceeding 105,000 in the sector—the equivalent of one in three jobs advertised going unfilled.
But she also added: “It’s a bit of a sad indictment on the country that we need overseas migration to deliver our pipeline. I think we should be able to do that within our own country.
“I’d love to put the challenge out there to look at the 50 per cent of the gene pool that we haven’t tapped.
“Thirty-five years ago, we were at 12.5 per cent female participation, we’re still 12.5 per cent 35 years later.
“There’s enormous opportunity for us as an industry to go through a bit of a cultural change … and bring a whole lot of talented women into the industry to deliver these projects.”
