Trying to get a job is awful. You can write hundreds of letters of application and receive only a handful of polite negative responses and no response at all from the remainder.
You lie awake at night wondering how you will pay your bills. Of course, many other countries are worse, but employment in Australia seems to be disappearing; you wonder what the jobs in the middle of this century will be. Not in car manufacturing, it seems.
Our politicians keep telling us that they want us to work, and that jobs are the issue.
They seem to be missing the point, though—where are the jobs?
We should pursue areas of research and industrial development based on the outcomes we need.
Germany has done a similar thing by using the other weaker economies in the EU to hold the Euro down, but our Australian politicians dropped the ball on the Dutch disease.
Most don’t even know that the phrase refers to a reduction in employment when raw material exports raise your currency to the point where manufacturing dies. And it has—manufacturing has been sacrificed on the altar of coal and iron exports.
Employment principals
First we need some principles about employment in general—employment principles—and then some principles about where the work is going to come from—jobs principles.
The first employment principle is that of high wages. We must accept that we will never get sustained employment at the hourly rates of many Asian countries.
Australia will not tolerate that level of poverty. Therefore, there are many jobs done overseas that we cannot do competitively. This means that we must have an educated population, so fixing the education system is our top priority.
In some areas in China, students are, on average, two years ahead of Australian students in science and maths, so alarm bells should be ringing.
We need internet-based products for science and maths, especially for secondary school students, while we crank up support for teachers to the level where people with research degrees are attracted to teaching in schools.
Another issue with our education system is the schism between universities and business.
Friends of mine recount horror stories of academics feeling no obligation to do agreed upon work in association with industry, or even questioning the morals of those who would leave the hallowed halls of universities for the foulness of business.
Australia is close to bottom of the OECD when it comes to producing the fruit of cooperation between industry and academia. As long as this persists we will be badly uncompetitive.
Another principle is fairness. It is simply not fair for some senior executives to get paid more than 100 times other fully employed people in the same company. Company tax and government assistance should strongly encourage pay ratios closer to 20-to-one or less.
The source of jobs: pursue what we know and what we need
I propose two jobs principles. The first is pretty obvious and was a foundation of the McKinsey report which the Business Council of Australia used to generate the Building Australia’s Comparative Advantages report.
We should pursue things we are already good at. This is government policy as outlined in the Industry Innovation and Competitiveness Agenda paper, which was released by Ian Macfarlane and Tony Abbott late in 2014.
The government names food and agribusiness, mining equipment and technology services, medical technologies and pharmaceuticals, advanced manufacturing, and energy resources as the activities to promote.
It makes sense to grow these activities, but you wonder how many jobs they will create, especially for those without university degrees.
The second principle is more courageous in the Yes Minister sense.
We should pursue areas of research and industrial development based on the outcomes we need.
Develop tools to defeat Australia's vastness
Our physical characteristics show us where we ought to be the best, even if we aren't. Australia has the lowest population density in the top 100 countries by population—three people per square kilometre. Only Namibia and Mongolia have populations exceeding one million people and lower population density. Australia is also the driest populated continent on earth.
The low population density means we have a travel problem.
It costs us more in time and jet fuel to get from one capital to another—so we should be the world leader in video conferencing.
Many of us have experienced a combined meeting, with several people in one place and several in another; I have not yet met anyone who says it works as well as being in the same place. I think we should try for something less ambitious, like working out a system for meetings between two people at different locations.
We want a system to connect one person with one other person, in a way where you cannot tell whether the other person is in the room with you, or is thousands of kilometres away, except perhaps that you can’t touch them or smell them. Let’s call this the eye-to-eye system. Australia should develop it.
We need it more than anyone else on earth. How many Australian jobs could be done from home using eye-to-eye? Imagine parliament done with eye-to-eye where the speaker selects the person being broadcast to everyone else.
Doctors could interview remote patients. Legal and government interactions could span hundreds of kilometres. This product would re-invigorate regional Australia and save billions of dollars in road construction.
If travel can’t be avoided then we should make it better.
We need trains which can travel on existing rail lines at 300 kilometres per hour. There are many reasons why today’s Australian trains are slower than those in France and Japan, but the main one is that the tracks are not dead straight.
To get high speed rail we might have to add a communications network to manage level crossings and straighten out some corners, but relaying the tracks laser-straight over hundreds of kilometres is just too expensive.
We need a radically different vehicle to run on the existing rails, like a high pressure hovercraft or a train with active suspension which anticipates bumps.
The thing about rail lines is that the bumps stay in the same places, so you know when you are going to hit one.
Imagine a three hour Melbourne to Sydney rail trip on existing tracks. Cancel Badgerys Creek and save at least $6 billion. Get the airlines to participate—they are in the high speed transport business after all—and government expenditure could be much less than the cost of an airport.
The dryness of Australia has already produced great advances in agriculture, but most of them do not involve many jobs.
A more challenging and more dramatic departure from common practice would be intensive farming in enclosures which capture the water transpired by the plants.
The key fact is that 99.9 per cent of the water consumed by plants goes out of their leaves. The water is just a transport medium. Only one part in a thousand goes into making the plant.
If you can recycle the 99.9 per cent, you can grow tomatoes in a sunny desert. As the inhabitants of driest habitable continent, we should master this technology. Imagine turning all those near-deserts into vegetable farms. That could banish starvation worldwide and employ millions of people.
Opportunities in manufacturing
We can’t leave sources of employment without considering manufacturing. This is the hardest problem.
To start with, we want to save some automotive manufacturing. There will never be a cheaper time to start a new car manufacturing operation in Australia than in the last half of this decade, because that is when the multinationals will be selling up.
What we need is an electric car which includes a recharger powered by a small petrol engine.
It can be a bit more expensive than imports of the same size because of the potential reduction in running cost. We need to be able to charge the battery at home for commuting, but drive around Australia using the petrol recharger when we are on holiday.
A second manufacturing activity we should carefully consider arises from a threat to our present mining activities.
Coal and liquefied natural gas, or LNG, make up a large part of our exports.
We should remember the lesson which the US rail companies failed to learn—always address the fundamentals of the market.
The rail companies thought they were in the railway business, but they were actually in the transport business, and they were driven bankrupt by companies flying planes.
So Australia is really in the energy business in a big way, but the carbon based contributions of coal and LNG are threatened by the global reaction to climate change.
We need to broaden out of those energy products into the power systems of the future. We are too late to capture enough of the market in photovoltaic manufacturing or nuclear reactor production. We have to look to something novel which can supply heat and power.
Environmental technologies
Home solar thermal is the idea of using the heat of the sun to generate electricity then hot water and then home heating in kind of waterfall as heat moves to lower temperatures.
A fire, whether driven by wood or natural gas, can substitute for the sun at night. The steam motor and mirrors are not particularly novel, but need further engineering and investment in manufacturing.
The system can compete with photovoltaic systems on price, and it can supply power continuously. The 24/7 power capability means that remote dwellings not yet connected to the grid can provide an initial market.
The coal exporter who develops it will get insurance against concerns about global warming.
You may say the suggestions I have made are rudimentary, even embryonic. Sure, but at least they have vision.
The government’s present plan is simply to try to grow what works now, and that often creates failure.
It would not cost much to try to address the challenges of eye-to-eye video conferencing, high speed travel on existing rail lines, and solar thermal systems. I urge you prime minister—man up to exploring a bit of blue sky.
This article contains content that is not available.
This is an edited version of Melbourne-based computer programmer Geoff Hudson's Ockham's Razor talk.
Ockham’s Razor is a soap box for all things scientific, with short talks about research, industry and policy from people with something thoughtful to say about science.