Skills shortages have CEOs worried about Gillard: Kohler

Julia Gillard has failed to win over Australia’s chief executives; in fact her “preferred Prime Minister” rating is roughly the reverse of the electorate as a whole.

Twenty-six per cent of CEOs surveyed think Gillard would make a better PM, compared with 52& for Tony Abbott. The latest Newspoll in The Australian yesterday has them 50 and 35%, the other way around.

And if there is one single issue that causes the bosses to support Abbott over Gillard, it is HR.

The CEOs support Coalition policy over ALP policy on every topic, but especially industrial relations (73% versus 21%), and overwhelmingly the issue that keeps CEOs awake at night, as it has been all year, is “being able to source skilled staff”.

While every other issue that we ask the CEOs about has chopped and changed this year as the most likely thing to keep them awake at night, staffing has steadily increased in importance – from 48 per cent in the first quarter to 55% this month.

Little wonder, then, that Julia Gillard’s combination of a “small Australia” and her “fair work” IR system, which brings back awards, with “comparative wage justice”, and re-empowers the unions, has got the bosses offside.

In some of the narrative with this month’s survey the CEOs advise Gillard to “accept her role in the current labour policy mistakes”, and make it clear what she personally stands for.

And the CEOs’ concerns won’t be eased by Treasury documents this week that suggest the immigration surge of the past few years was driven by labour demand in Western Australia and Queensland and that the re-emergence of the mining boom this year will push the economy back to full capacity as soon as next year.

Treasury says this will require both a “supply response”, in the form of more immigration, as well as a flexible workforce.

No doubt the CEOs in the non-mining states can see labour shortages in WA and Queensland making it even harder to get skilled staff than it is now, as well as pushing up wages across the country through the new award-based IR legislation.

Overall, chief executives go into this election less optimistic about the prospects for the Australian economy (54% are optimistic, down from 60% last month) but feeling just as good as they were about their own businesses (steady at 82% optimistic).

Research design and analysis for the CEO Pulse was conducted by GA Research and fieldwork by AFS. The sample comprised 62 CEOs of organisations with an Australian turnover of $100 million or more who opted to participate in a five minute survey conducted over the phone or online between Wednesday August 5 and Sunday August 15, 2010.

This article first appeared on Business Spectator.