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| Lara Bingle enticed tourists to Australia in the famous ad |
So the papers are all up in
arms this week over the defection of Lara Bingle, the model who promoted
Australian tourism in the famous and sometimes controversial ‘Where
the bloody hell are you?’ ad.
Lara’s talents, it seems, are
for sale to the highest bidder. In this case New Zealand. Fair enough; the
woman is a professional, let her take work wherever she can find it. The job
market for models, like any other profession, is international.
I don’t think we’re suffering
too much. Six million tourists visited our shores over the last year, a 0.5%
increase on the previous year. Considering the economic state of the countries
that yield a lot of our tourism dollars, we should be glad of these numbers.
Especially while Europe is still frantically searching under the sofa for its
lost credit card, and the Americans are on self imposed lock down.
Let’s face the fact that
tourism is far less of an issue right now than encouraging the right number of
high skilled migrants to move here for long term temporary assignments and fill
some empty Australian engineering jobs.
Australia will become the
world's biggest liquefied natural gas producer, by 2020 as it unlocks its 100
year reserves. Analysts predict it will soon overtake current leader Qatar.
Seventy percent of the world's
10 major LNG projects are under construction here and billions are being spent
on infrastructure year on year.
The biggest threat to achieving
this growth and all the benefits that come with it is people. We don’t have the
engineering skills in the quantity we need them in house and we need to look
overseas for them now. We need to look to the UK and Europe to build our
engineering workforces and absorb the key skills into the Australian population
in greater numbers.
So if you see Lara, tell her to
find a drawing board and a hard hat and make Australian engineering jobs sound
sexy and exciting. Australia may need her yet.
