Forget AI: offshoring is the real threat to Australian jobs

For a growing number of businesses, the future decision may therefore not be a straightforward choice between employing an Australian worker and employing somebody overseas. The real choice may be between engaging someone offshore, leaving the role unfilled or potentially reaching a point where parts of the business are no longer commercially sustainable.

That distinction is important because Australia cannot have a meaningful debate about offshoring without acknowledging why businesses are considering it in the first place.

Australian workers need to rethink what makes them valuable

None of this means Australia's employment future is hopeless, but it does mean Australian workers need to think much more carefully about what makes their contribution difficult to replace in an increasingly global labour market.

Simply completing routine tasks may become less valuable when those tasks can be automated, performed overseas or completed by offshore employees using increasingly sophisticated technology. The qualities that are likely to become more important are those that are harder to commoditise across an international workforce, including local knowledge, strategic thinking, leadership, creativity, specialist expertise, commercial judgement, relationship management and the ability to understand and solve complicated problems.

Australian workers therefore need to move beyond asking whether somebody else could technically perform their job and start thinking about the value they bring that makes an employer specifically want them to perform it. This is a much more challenging question, but it will become increasingly important as businesses gain access to larger international talent pools.

Employers also have a responsibility to think strategically rather than viewing offshoring purely as a cost-cutting exercise. Moving work overseas without appropriate systems, security, management, quality control and understanding of the work being transferred can create significant problems, and lower labour costs alone do not automatically produce better business outcomes.

Australia needs an honest national conversation

Australia needs to stop treating offshoring as a fringe business practice and start recognising it as part of a much larger conversation about productivity, employment and our international competitiveness.

We cannot continually increase the cost and complexity of employing people locally while assuming businesses will never investigate international alternatives, particularly when technological developments have made those alternatives easier to access than at any previous point.

The challenge for governments, industry and workers is determining how Australia maintains good wages and employment conditions while ensuring local businesses remain globally competitive. We need to consider how productivity can be improved, how businesses can be encouraged to continue creating Australian jobs and how workers can prepare for a labour market in which their competition may no longer live in the same city, state or even country.

These questions deserve considerably more attention because they go to the heart of Australia's future workforce and economic competitiveness. AI generates dramatic headlines because the idea of machines replacing people captures the imagination, but while we debate what artificial intelligence might do to Australian employment over the next five or ten years, businesses are already discovering what global workforces can do today.

Offshoring can create enormous opportunities for Australian businesses by reducing costs, addressing skills shortages, increasing flexibility and helping companies remain viable during difficult economic conditions. At the same time, we should not pretend there isn't another side to that equation, because the very thing capable of helping Australian businesses remain competitive may also place increasing pressure on Australian jobs.

The uncomfortable reality Australia needs to confront is that the greatest immediate competitor for many Australian workers may not be a robot, algorithm or chatbot at all, but another highly capable human being sitting thousands of kilometres away, connected to exactly the same global workplace.