THE LABOUR shortage is one of the top risks nominated by almost every sector of the economy now, but the difficulties this poses for one of Australia’s other major bottlenecks – infrastructure – are perhaps more acute than most.

Mark Elliot, managing director of Bilfinger Berger Services, says there needs to be some swift action to change immigration policies to allow a faster inflow of skilled workers, retraining programs for workers in declining industries as well as fast-tracking of apprenticeships and increasing incentives to enter trades and professions such as engineering.

“You have got an infrastructure program going out for a decade, and a third of the workforce [in construction] (around 350,000 people) is over the age of 45, and tradespeople tend to retire when their around 50, so we’re soon going to lose a [substantial part] of the workforce.”

At the same time, he said the construction industry needed around 100,000 extra people in the next five years.

One of the results of the shortage is that risks to safety on worksites are also increasing as there are not enough adequately qualified managers to go around.

“The quality of people they are getting at the project manager, project engineer, supervisor, and foreman level are not what they used to be. They’re not as experienced,”he said.

“Instead of seven or eight project engineers, you may need 10 to cover the same size project and level of skills. And they are younger and less experienced. Now that increases risk,” he told an Informa conference on infrastructure financing.

Elliot said projects are also taking longer to complete, and while labour costs hadn’t gone up as much as demand, they had risen significantly.

Shortages in staff are unique compared to other shortfalls in resources, he said, and needed a range of short- and long-term remedies.

Ensuring more young people were going into trades where shortages existed was important. This included providing greater incentives for school leavers to take vocational education, as well as fast-track apprenticeships and better pay and conditions for apprentices.

But medium-term he said immigration laws need to be further liberalised, in part to also counteract an outflow offshore.

He compared the task ahead to the scale of the Snowy Mountains hydro-electric scheme, which required thousands of immigrant workers to complete following the Second World War.

He said the 457 visa – which is the most common method for employers to sponsor immigrants on a temporary basis – is a start, but there needs to be something that allows a much larger influx of skilled migrants.

There also needed to be more effective programs to retrain workers in declining industries so they can be transferred to other sectors that have shortages.

This would involve not just working with the government to introduce training programs, but collaboration across all industries to determine where the shortages are, and where there is oversupply and target plans appropriately.

“We need to be working with our industry, as well as the government. We need collaboration across different interested parties,”he told Risk Management.

He said the new Federal Government was on the right track with an overarching body to identity the gaps in infrastructure and allocate resources where necessary in Infrastructure Australia, and legislation had been drafted for a new advisory body at the federal level, and better coordination between state and federal governments.