Fiji’s skills shortage and brain drain has been gravely worsened by mismatched policies brought in by the previous government – Prof.Prasad

The Fiji experience of skills shortage and brain drain has been gravely worsened by mismatched policies brought in by the previous government.

Those are the words of Deputy Prime Minister, Professor Biman Prasad as he says the previous government, without any consultation, introduced an education curriculum that was more akin to social engineering, where pass marks were heavily scaled forcing more tertiary institution enrollments.

But he says there was lower or no employment at the other end of the spectrum, forcing students and their parents or guardians to default on loan repayments to the State that was taken to pay for their tertiary education.

Professor Prasad says our national workforce planning capability was not in step with tertiary education opportunities and unemployment statistics.

He says our technical and vocational facilities were set up and then suddenly disbanded, forcing unemployment of staff and creating huge uncertainty for students.

The Deputy Prime Minister says the government’s forced retirement age policy, unfair pension fund contributions and unilateral contracting of public servants with unreasonable contract terms heaped with subjective performance management had a cascading effect leading to lack of morale, low productivity (that was conveniently un-measured) and quite simply the disjointed policies created chaos and confusion.

He acknowledges the skills shortages in key areas such as construction, nursing, and specialist fields like telecommunications engineers, and aviation safety regulators among others.

Professor Prasad says this issue is multi-faceted, and Pacific Island nations like ours will always grapple with brain drain and the attraction of better remuneration and education, healthcare and lifestyle abroad, as we have experienced for more than 3 decades.

He says the Coalition Government is fully determined to roll-back all the policy incompetence that the nation had to endure for the past 16 years, and this has already started with the repeal in Parliament of draconian and regressive legislation that completely disregarded evidence-based policy making for the betterment of all our people.

Professor Prasad also says the last 16 years of our nation’s history were all about short-term gain, which has left us with long-term pain.

He says as a kind and caring Coalition Government, they are and will at all times show compassion and empathy.

Professor Prasad also says they have started evidence-based policy making in terms of fixing our education system without penalizing our students and writing off $650 million of student debt, ensuring there is value for money in the restoration of our infrastructure like water supply, rebuilding our public health and medical delivery services that were left in a state of decay, initiating plans to uplift people from poverty but at the same-time increasing welfare payments, increasing VAT to pay for the ills of the past but maintaining zero-rating on basic food an essential items including prescription medication, and lowering duty on widely consumed meat products and canned fish.