The Regional Australia Institute’s Regional Australia Council members include some of Australia’s biggest employers such as Aurizon, Australia Post, Bendigo and Adelaide Bank, Commonwealth, Domain, Elders, Essential Energy, Expedia Group, KPMG, NAB, nbn co., Nutrien Ag Solutions, NRMA, Optus, Transgrid, Telstra and Woolworths and said they cannot find enough people with the requisite skills to fill staff vacancies.
RAI chief executive Liz Ritchie said this comes in the context of last week’s record 93,000 regional job vacancies as reported by the National Skills Commission.
“Central to the job challenge is a historically tight regional rental market, which is impeding the attraction of new recruits to our regions and therefore putting a handbrake on business growth,” Ms Ritchie said.
“In order to change our future, we must act and think differently, and we must call on our leaders to do the same. Australia needs a tailored regional lens on the issues affecting our nation. We are not a homogeneous nation, we are diverse and this requires unique solutions and settings.”
The RAI’s Regionalisation Ambition 2032 includes targets to reduce recruitment difficulty to 40 per cent down from 70 per cent in 2022 and to increase regional rental vacancy rates to above 3 per cent. Vacancy rates in many regional centres are currently below 1 per cent.
Having co-developed the Regionalisation Ambition 2032, the focus of the council, through the RAI, now turns to bringing about the policy and investment changes needed to achieve targets and to rebalance the nation.
“The Council is of firm agreement that shared advocacy across the whole of government is the best strategy. We thank them for their commitment to rebalancing our nation,” Ms Ritchie said.
