From the Chair: 7 September 2022

By Michael Firman, MEA Chairman

The arrival of spring is something I look forward to every year, and not just for the warmer weather it brings. Spring has announced itself most notably in my garden as dormant plants & shrubs begin to revive and reinvigorate after a cold Melbourne winter.

It’s also the time of year that heralds the start of the major events season, with a plethora of sporting events, grand final celebrations and all manner of outdoor gatherings including festivals, carnivals and community events.

The start of spring has also coincided with the Albanese government’s Jobs & Skills Summit aimed at addressing some of the issues faced by business today, in particular labour & skills shortages that are crippling businesses around the country.

A few days earlier the Minister for Tourism and Trade, Senator the Hon Don Farrell, led the Tourism Jobs Summit in discussing the workforce capability challenges of the visitor economy. The findings of this summit were intended to inform the Jobs and Skills Summit, development of the Government’s Employment White Paper, and visitor economy workforce and skills strategy.

So what did we learn and how does it impact the meetings and events industry?

The visitor economy is made up of anyone who provides or promotes services to Australia’s domestic and international visitors. This includes the travel, tourism, hospitality, accommodation, and events industries. According to Austrade, the visitor economy is the fourth biggest sector of the Australian economy, the 8th biggest employer and was growing 45% faster than the rest of Australia’s economy prior to the pandemic.

It has long endured workforce capability challenges due to the seasonal and/or casual nature of many roles, perceptions of unfavourable employment conditions and concerns about the lack of long-term career opportunities.

Austrade Chief Economist Heather Cotching has said that the overall the size of the Australian workforce increased by 313,000 during the pandemic years but jobs in tourism went backwards. Workforce growth occurred across health care, retail trade, administrative services, manufacturing and construction.

The Tourism Jobs Summit identified three key challenges for the sector: workforce supply, workforce capability, and consideration as a career of choice.

The Tourism Jobs Summit findings highlight the importance of using a mix of solutions and priorities to address workforce issues for industry and governments, and include;

• reforming the migration program and better activation of temporary and seasonal workers in Australia;
• removing disincentives from welfare and tax systems to encourage a return to the workforce by mature aged workers, students, skilled migrants, and other cohorts such as pensioners, those on unemployment benefits, second jobs, people with a disability and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples;
• attracting international students and giving them greater work rights, while increasing permanent skilled migration.
• positioning the visitor economy as a “career” for young Australians and women and the need for industry to take steps to boost its reputation so it is able to attract skilled staff
• incentivising employers to improve on the job training with financial support for traineeships, apprenticeships and higher-level courses, and
• achieving a national consistency of training programs and qualifications and better integration between training providers and industry to ensure training meets business needs.

In the response to the government’s Jobs and Skills Summit, Treasury announced “immediate actions will be taken to build a bigger, better trained, and more productive workforce – to help deliver secure jobs with growing wages, boost incomes and living standards and create more opportunities for more Australians”.

I must admit when I read through the Treasury announcement I didn’t observe a lot of outcomes specific to the meetings and events industry.

Accelerating the delivery of 465,000 additional fee-free TAFE places will not provide industry specific training for our sector. The travel, tourism, hospitality, accommodation and events industries each need their own industry cluster for skills and training. This investment needs to be extended to include quality accredited non-government operated training providers. By no means does MEA purport to imply TAFE as bad. We do however comfortably assert ourselves to be good, and a producer of highly competent graduates who go on to achieve great success in the events field.

The very reason that MEA developed its own Diploma of Event Management qualification was to educate, upskill and consolidate a career in the events industry. By enabling access

to an industry developed and delivered traineeship, diploma or bespoke training course to meet business needs, government enables industries including ours to establish benchmarks of quality, service, delivery expectations, safety, and risk management standards. Their doing so would also underwrite confidence that viable career paths exist in those industries. A perception of faith by government in an industry empowers that industry to attract and retain a workforce, which in time reduces the need for reliance on government. It becomes self-fulfilling.

As I look forward to spring and the impending major events season, there will be no greater advertisement for the events industry, no greater opportunity for on-the-job training, and no better time of the year for our industry to promote itself as an employer of choice. This can equally be our time in the sun, one that sees us bloom in concert with the flowers.