Our main problem Michael is that the previous federal government did nothing to ensure we had skilled labour in this country. Wombat will disagree with me on this but I contend that the various national apprentice training schemes we had were dismantled by the Howard Government (1996-2007) and that his lack of skilled labour had an inflationary effect because it forced the price of skilled labour up (simple supply/demand).

In a panic in the last years of government, the Howard government tried to ameliorate this situation by bringing in foreign workers on special limited term visas to supply skilled labour for specific projects working for specific employers. This was supposed to dampen the demand for skilled labour and therefore force down the cost of skilled labour to Australian business. It failed. We are now facing the inflationary problems caused by capacity constraints that the previous government was either too stupid or too complacent (probably both) to anticipate.