Dig It Ship It Live It

In a world that proves to be changing faster than any one individual can comprehend, it is no wonder that we strive to label the unknown in an attempt to make it knowable. Does Australia really have a 2 speed economy? Or is it really an adjunct to the facebook phenomenon? - A far reaching social change borne from our acceptance of new technology!

Life in remote communities as isolation is not a perception held by the residents, only maybe by onlookers. Go there. Be there. Live it.

Social Technology has re-defined remoteness as equally as has the availability of FIFO - fly in fly out travel for remote area workers. Our acceptance to go where commerce demands is made tolerable with the relatively low cost and availability of air travel, and the ease to which individuals can remain connected through social technology.

Combine the sheer scale and demand for new resource projects together with the speed of the new digital economy, and we give rise to an immediate need for skilled workers in remote locations on a scale not imagined before.

Together with information rich communication technology, FIFO has enabled employers to have access into a national labour market, while the workers themselves are able to choose where their families will live, without the need to relocate.

The immediacy of demand to market for the mineral boom has created many new instant worker accommodation sites that are akin to construction camps, but used for the long term rotation of skills. Changing demands from short term construction trades, operational workers, and periodic maintenance engineers, combined with late 20^th century specialisation of skills in the labour market preclude workers from permanent relocation. Workers are transporting their skills to many sites from a preferred base.

Beyond the practical and immediate, workers are therefore choosing a lifestyle for their family, separate to their place of work. The allure of the city, for all its offerings; diversity, cultural, engaging, education, employment and transport is a deep and rich market not found regionally despite the same access to the travel and communications. Regional towns are therefore no match in competing with the city to house remote area worker families. To compete with the pull of the city, is purely to match its offer mix; complex, rich and diverse.

Like all things in the digital age, the scale of trade has increased exponentially, and whilst we think e-commerce has enabled a massive dispersal of workers, it has also seen concentrations of top level resources in the city, in what is a global market for top talent.

Cities are the new production sites in the digital age because it is the home for specialist skilled workers, whereas natural resources are mined where the earth has placed them.

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