Multi Outcome Construction Policy (final report)

“There’s a disbenefit in taking an untrained indigenous person on, with noprocess to train them because what effectively you’re getting is 50% or lessproductivity.”However, he also noted that the costs from the lower in productivity can be reducedthrough training:“Whereas on the … thing, there’s the benefit of saying if I can get these guystrained up, particularly if I factored in some loss of productivity because Iknow these guys are really green and I can overcome that and actually getsome productivity, then there’s a benefit.”The attitude of head contractors and/or subcontractors to the employment ofindigenous workers was identified by a representative from Construction SkillsQueensland as a further factor affecting the costs (and benefits) of the policy. This isreflected in the following exchange with the interviewer:Representative: “You had people coming in who were contractors and paying20% lip-service to the 20% and sitting them under a tree.”Interviewer:“So not actually doing any training, just employing them butnot actually doing anything?”Representative: “That’s it yeah. And that didn’t work either. They said “wellthey wouldn’t come back after the second week, and I said“well, if you were sitting under a tree for two weeks wouldyou come back?”The willingness of indigenous communities to participate in the policy also appears,from our transcript evidence, to affect the policy’s costs. It appears that somecommunities are very willing to participate whilst others have been less thanenthusiastic. One interviewee noted that the costs involved in coordinating resourcesand indigenous labour were high in communities that were less than enthusiasticabout the policy.As was the case for the 10% Training Policy, there appears to be little in the way ofquantitative measures of the benefits of the Indigenous Employment Policy. Most of85