“The biggest issue for us is actually not so much the cost of labour but the shortage of labour.
“We previously have been able to rely on immigration to assist here in Australia to offset some of the wage needs that we have, whether that’s a cleaner at a worksite all the way through to our skilled staff that we need to operate the business.
“So labour productivity is a key focus, but skills and the shortage of skills is also the major issue for us, if you have a look not only directly in our own operations, but the communities that we operate within.”
Asked where the workers have gone, Mr Lamont said he had not seen them anywhere during trips abroad in the last several months.
“It’s a really good question because I don’t know the answer to that because [I’ve] been travelling around the world recently and I don’t know of any economy that I go to – everyone’s struggling for labour,” he said.
“A fair [bit] of that, I think, is probably [because of Covid-19], but people have [also] rethought how they actually want to work.
Seems decades long wars on labour, wars on training and development, demonising foreigners, hasn’t work out well for business in the long term.