Hi davo, The right way to approach education & training is to have a Government (bilaterally agreed) long term economic plan. I agree that training people for the prospect of jobs that are not provisioned for is a silly strategy.
With our anti-China political stance, the obvious way to kill 2 birds with the one stone is to process our own iron ore & bauxite , add value, develop companion industries, provide Aussies with well paid/meaningful jobs , diversify trade away from China, lift our GDP , improve our trade surplus and support the AUD. The Government has to lead this scale of industrialisation rather than leaving it to multinationals who just want to make money now and bugger Australia 's long term industrial development. We simply have to lift our game.
China can build a mega factory in a year from wo to go so why does it take us 5 years to build a runaway at an airport? Our econoic programs should provision for rapid development rather than becomming bogged down in ridiculous red tape as if we are re-inventing the wheel!
And for those who say that we cant find the capital; just look at what we're doling out at present into a consumer market where most of the handouts end up overseas and dont mention the $300 billion of hardware (most of it going overseas) for the Defence Forces. It looks like we can find $600 billion for these non productive persuits so why cant we find $half a Trillion to industrialise and nation build.?
We have seen multinationals pull up pegs when the going got tough so we simply cant base a long term economic plan on others. We have to get off our asses and do it ourselves. With increased automation and AI, we can simply outdo the obsolescent smelters and steel mills in China, Japan & Korea. We have all the base resources here and we have already 7 FTAs to give us access to a significant share of global customers without Trump-like tariff barriers.
So rather than bag the ABC (they're the messenger) it is more appropriate to vote for the party with the best industrial policies come the next election .
I expect the "Cant Bat/Cant Bowl" brigade will tell us why this cant be done. We have no qualms of facing the rest of the world in sport but we are rather shy when it comes to industry & manufacturing. We like to import!
