While mining companies regularly grab the headlines by demanding cheap overseas labour to plug their problem with skills shortages, other businesses are also finding the skills situation tough.
A Bankwest Skills Shortage Survey last month found that two in five Australian businesses are finding it hard to recruit, with more than a fifth having to turn down to work due to a lack of staff.
Budget-driven investment into a co-ordinated skills strategy could ease the burden on start-ups, but such a move looks unlikely in our surplus-obsessed times.
The CPA’s Ord told SmartCompany: “We are guessing there will be some skills packages and things like that, but because of the surplus fetish there are a whole lot of piecemeal approaches to approving productivity.”
“What we need is a more thoughtful, root and branch measures to improve productivity.
“Last year the Budget included a few things around apprenticeships and vocational skills and we expect to see that again.”
The establishment of a dedicated helpline for small businesses is one of the Federal Government’s few unqualified successes when it comes to the SME sector.
However, this phone-based service has arrived amid a worrying decline in face-to-face help for budding entrepreneurs.
In March, the Wagga Wagga Business Enterprise Centre closed due to shrinking federal and state funds, becoming just the latest BEC to face the chop.
In South Australia, the advice centres have been decimated, along with Business SA and Innovate SA, by state government cutbacks.
John Rumens, director of the Wagga BEC, told the ABC: “We’re not alone. Wagga’s one of a number of Business Enterprise Centres that have gone to the wall over the last several years.”
“And I imagine there will be others, indeed, that are likely to go the same way.”
Start-ups don’t only require an advice centre to drop into once in a while, they require ongoing, specialised mentorship from business leaders who have seen and done it all.
Alas, although functions such as mentor speed dating have emerged in recent times, there is no integrated mentor network for new entrepreneurs to call upon.
A Budget-funded mentor network is most needed in areas such as tech, where, as StartupSmart has exposed, there is a chronic lack of female figureheads for the next generation of women-led web businesses to connect with.
While he’s going about building an advice and mentorship infrastructure for new businesses, Swan could also commit genuine resources to keeping our brightest start-ups in Australia.
In February, we were confronted by the rather odd sight of the NSW state government funding local start-ups to relocate to innovation hub Startup House in San Francisco.
Here’s a crazy idea – instead of encouraging our best start-up talent to flee Australia as soon as possible, why don’t state and federal governments actually fund our own versions of Startup House and boost growth, jobs and prosperity in our own country?
François Hollande, who has just become France’s first Socialist president since 1995 after his electoral triumph over Nicholas Sarkozy, at first seems an unlikely natural ally of entrepreneurship.
But some of his small business ideas are worthy of consideration by Swan. For example, he plans to launch a publicly funded bank for small businesses and slash the SME tax rate to a mere 15%.
Putting aside France’s soaring unemployment and struggles with debt for one moment, why not deploy a bit of Gallic thinking, Wayne?
