A warm welcome to the August 2013 edition of the CGC Newsletter. It’s with great pleasure that we announce another employee into the CGC family, Glynis MacDonald. Glynis has been employed as Office Manager and brings a wealth of experience having previously worked in the banking and finance sector.
Sporting rivalry and opinion continue to fill the air at CGC HQ. The Lions and Wimbledon came and went so the focus turned to the City to Surf (as completed by CGC consultants David Cox and Daniel Kundi), The Ashes and Liverpool FC playing in Melbourne.
Our very own Steve Morris at CGC made the 11 hour train journey from Sydney to Melbourne which allowed him plenty of time to soak up the pre-game atmosphere.
The CGC Kop on tour…
It was great for the banter and chatter on the train and gave us a real flavour for the atmosphere that was to follow. The whole of Melbourne was turned red and the stadium was packed with Liverpool fans who gave the most spine-tingling rendition of You’ll Never Walk Alone I’m ever likely to hear. A competitive game followed with a 2-0 victory for the crowd favourites and the rest of the night was left to savouring the bars and sights of the city.
With the Federal Election looming there is a great deal of expectation regarding construction and engineering spend.
In the run up to the election there has actually been a fair degree of work underway in the mining states – Western Australia and the Northern Territory have led the way and NSW has also contributed.
Whilst in other industries there is a degree of caution in the lead up to election, it is quite encouraging that we’re not seeing a significant fall in terms of construction work done, particularly in the building sector (please contact David Hope our specialist recruiter in the Building industry for more information).
CGC are of the opinion that confidence will continue and opportunity will be bolstered across the industry as soon as money is ploughed into long term infrastructure projects.
This view is shared by Stephen Durkin, CEO of Engineers Australia who believes Infrastructure should be at the top if the agenda after the September 7 election.
“Australia needs a long-term infrastructure planning system to underpin Australia’s social and economic development,” Durkin says, adding that infrastructure funding tends to come in boom-bust cycles, which has a direct impact on engineering jobs.
“As infrastructure construction retracts, engineering professionals seek job security in other working environments, excluding their years of training and technical experience from Australia’s overall engineering capacity. Without continued experience and knowledge of contemporary best practice, many professional engineers do not return to engineering roles.”
Filling this gap with migrant engineers, Durkin says, barely meets demand in the boom phase and can only be a short-term, stop gap solution.
“Retaining a highly skilled engineering workforce by flattening out the investment cycle is critical for successfully delivering infrastructure for the future of Australia,” he says. “As a large consumer of engineering services through its investment in infrastructure, government is best placed to ameliorate the cyclic nature of infrastructure spending with a long-term pipeline of confirmed projects.”
“Infrastructure underpins a successful economy, enables innovation and encourages business investment. We need to avoid acute demand spikes across specific locations and engineering specialisations, and provide more certainty to those employed in the delivery of major infrastructure projects.”
CGC are visiting the polling booths this week with the talk moving away from sport and onto politics. Whoever is the successful party CGC are looking forward to the plans and spend which will directly influence the engineering and construction sector in Australia.
