Welcome to the world’s most statistically literate Oscar (OSCA) ceremony.
I want to acknowledge traditional owners, recognise all First Nations people present, and to say how much I appreciate the work that the ABS does towards closing the gaps.
It’s a rare event where I get to put on my ‘I Love Evidence’ badge, so thank you for giving me an excuse to do that today.
To the Chief Statistician, the extraordinary David Gruen, congratulations on your appointment for another 5‑year term.
I acknowledge Philip Gould, AJ Lanyon, Fan Xiang, Megan Leahy and Majella Fitzsimmons, for the perspectives that each of you bring to today’s conversation.
It is exciting to be launching a new occupational classification system.
It’s a process that as the Chief Statistician has said, has been going for the past 2 years.
It has brought together the best of the ABS’s human engagement and data usage.
The consultation process spanned 200 days, involving over 2,000 stakeholders and 800 submissions.
The ABS also used artificial intelligence to help construct task descriptions.
Not artificial intelligence unchecked, but artificial intelligence carefully reviewed by humans.
ChatGPT produced a draft set of a set of task descriptions for each occupation, saving approximately 1,600 hours of work and delivering a sevenfold return on investment.
A big change from ANZSCO to OSCA is the separation of New Zealand occupational classification from Australian occupational classification.
This is, as Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin might have put it, a conscious un‑coupling.
Both countries’ statistical agencies decided that it made sense to go our own ways. That’s necessitated some changes in the occupational codes, which I will touch on shortly.
In this update, we’ve got some 300 new occupations added, some 250 occupations retired.
The coming and going of occupations says an awful lot about the Australian labour market.
As the Chief Statistician mentioned before, I’m also the Assistant Minister for Employment. In my former occupation as an economics professor, my speciality was labour economics, So I’ve long been fascinated by ways in which changes and occupational coding can tell us something about the way jobs are changing.
In my 2017 book, ‘Choosing Openness’, I looked at the changes from the Australian Standard Classification of Occupations 1986 (ASCO 1986) to the Australian and New Zealand Standard Classification of Occupations 2013 (ANZSCO 2013).
Over that period from the mid‑1980s to the mid‑2010s, we saw a set of occupations disappear: television repairers, complaints clerks, newsboys, public telephone money collectors, railway crossing attendants, lampmen, radio mechanics, tobacco machine attendants, and lighthouse keepers.
I’m old enough to remember plenty of people working in those occupations when I was a kid.
Over that period, you saw the emergence of new jobs: bloggers, baristas, weight loss consultants, aromatherapists, snow groomers, fitness centre managers, lobbyists, disability liaison officers, multimedia artists, life coaches, web developers and sterilisation technicians.
That’s just the change that took place in the 1980s to the mid‑2010s. Now we can see more change still.
Prior to this launch, I was fortunate enough to get a preview of a master list of those occupations that had been removed and those occupations that had been added.
You’ll be glad to know that I’m not going to take you through the hundreds of occupations that have gone out and those that have come in, but I do want to take a moment to say something about the kinds of factors that have driven occupations to disappear.
There’s a set of occupations that have disappeared through the forces of technology and trade, including small offset printers, motion picture projectionists, technical cable jointers, telephone betting clerks, train examiners, footwear factory workers, clothing pattern makers, and knitting machine operators.
Then there’s the operations that have gone as a result of New Zealand departing the occupational classification, including deer farmers, traditional Māori health practitioners, bungy jump masters.
And then there is the new jobs that are emerging.
A set of new jobs related to the net zero economy, including electric vehicle technicians, bush regenerators, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander land and sea rangers.
We have a set of occupations related to the growth of the care economy, including music therapists, respiratory or sleep scientists, diabetes educators, family dispute resolution practitioners, dental prosthetists, and dog walkers (because we don’t just care for human beings).
And then is a set of occupations related to new technologies, including cloud architects, cloud engineers, digital game developers, data architects and data engineers.
Relevant to those of you in the room, people at the ABS are both data architects, such as those who designed the OSCA classification scheme and data engineers, such as those who will set it out implementing the OSCA classifications.
And then there is a set of jobs that are just frankly cool jobs, including coffee roasters, circus performers, netball coaches, martial arts instructors and forensic accountants.
The change that we’ve seen in Australia’s occupational classifications reflect the change that we constantly see in the labour market.
Economist Paul Collier once described economic change as like running across ice floes.
There’s ice that’s melting and there’s ice that’s freezing. And you’re staying on top of it. And right now, the Australian labour market is staying on top of it with a million jobs created over the past couple of years and the unemployment rate now sitting at 4.1 per cent.
Finally, I want to note how much the Australian Government values the way in which the new OSCA classifications support and reflect what we are doing in a range of areas.
As we set about addressing the findings of the Royal Commission into aged care quality, OSCA includes changes in aged care occupational classifications. The existing aged or disability carer occupation has been split into 5 occupations, including aged care team leader, aged care support worker and disability team leader.
We’ve got changes that support the Australian Government’s National Plan to End Violence Against Women and Children, which include the existing occupation of welfare worker being split in OSCA into several specialised occupations, including family violence practitioner.
And there’s changes in OSCA that support the Australian Government’s initiatives to address the Australia‑wide workforce shortage of the early childhood education sector, including the existing ‘childcare worker’ occupation being split into 2 occupations: early childhood education room leader and early childhood educator.
There are many things to be learned from OSCA, and I would encourage those who have never had a look through an occupational classification system to take a squiz at it, because this list of occupations tells you a lot about the modern Australian workforce.
There is nothing grouchy about OSCA. Congratulations on everyone who has worked hard on producing this new occupational classification system. It is my pleasure to officially launch OSCA today.