Anglicare rent affordability report, page-3

Nice idea, but the truth is we don't have the critical mass of manufacturing and industry anymore to support the importation of skilled migrants. Semi skilled perhaps, but good trades and engineers aren't satisfied with just cruising.

We are already seeing the breakup of trades into subsets, generously labelled as 'specialist' instead of the limited skillsets they actually are. There are Cert IV's now for what was once just part of Cert III's originally as a cynical way for public servant tradies to step up a paygrade gratuitously like their pen pushing equals. Uni engineering no longer teaches hard stuff as an under graduate degree and might just as well be a 1 year course in using nomographs, precanned design software, CAD, spreadsheets, arrogance and arithmetic.

Today's majority skill pool works out of a trayback one tonner or ute and flogs itself into poverty over time due to fatigue, largesse, financial mismanagement, delinquent debors and burnout. There's no time for upskilling.