There’s a good article in the Australian Financial Review today about the labor shortage in Western Australia. It’s the first time I’ve seen the subject addressed.

Since I arrived in WA nearly two years ago, all the talk has been about a skills shortage. The shortage is across the board, skilled and unskilled.

The state’s chamber of commerce and industry estimates that an extra 400,000 workers will be needed in the next 10 years.

That’s on top of the additional 200,000 who have found jobs in the past six years.

The labor shortage has hit hard in service industries which traditionally have not paid high wages. A cafe at our local shopping centre was closed last week, with a sign outside saying it didn’t have staff to open. The business has been advertising jobs for months.

It’s a simplification to say these businesses should pay higher wages. That may be part of a solution, but it won’t address the whole problem, won’t necessarily be sustainable and will have flow-on effects to the economy and society.

I’m not an economist, but you don’t need a commerce degree to know the stresses afflicting Western Australia, and indeed the country, which now has a two-tier economy.

The labor shortage has pushed up wages, triggered inflation, raised interest rates and stimulated interstate migration. Consider Kalgoorlie.

Extra people have arrived (despite dodgy census figures saying they haven’t). There is now a chronic accommodation shortage and rents have lifted more than 50 percent in 12 months.

Many of the new arrivals are only qualified to work in lower-paid service sector jobs. If they can find a house to rent, chances are they can’t afford it.

The numbers of nurses, doctors and teachers haven’t kept pace with the rising population, nor have improvements to schools and hospitals.

Need someone to clean your house or mow your lawn? Forget it.

I don’t like to sound a prophet of doom, but this scenario is actually being lived out now and it’s rather scary. We are creating a working underclass who can’t afford to live in the boom while society can’t operate without them. The pressure in the pipe is building and I don’t think the pipe is strong enough to sustain it.

Interstate migration is a short-term solution, and not a very good one for the reasons I just indicated.

Longer term I agree with John Langoulant’s comments in the Financial Review that we need to increase immigration from overseas. It’s already happening with skilled people. Afrikaans is the most widely spoken language in Kalgoorlie after English.

Frankly though, we need laborers. If Western Australia can’t get the required people from the eastern states they will almost certainly have to come from Asia.

That’s why this important topic isn’t a highlight of the election campaign. No politician wants to open Pandora’s box.

I’ll open it here. Australia was built on Anglo-Irish foundations and I think we’d have a better society today if it had remained that way. It didn’t and that’s history.

If we are going to open the floodgates I believe we should encourage immigrants who speak our language and share parts of our culture. I’m talking about India, Sri Lanka and maybe the Philippines.