Chief Executive's Review
Notwithstanding the advent of the global financial crisis, 2008-2009 was a successful year for Engineers Australia – albeit marginally less successful than 2007-2008. Our overall performance rating was 80%, down 3% from last year. The year of the global financial crisis brought with it some ups and downs, not only to national and international economies but also to the engineering profession, Engineers Australia members and to the Institution itself.
The Australian Government’s response to the crisis through its stimulus packages, illustrated strikingly the value of our recommendations in the 2005 Infrastructure Report Card for Australia to establish a national infrastructure council to determine critical infrastructure priorities, responsibilities and funding sources. Without the work done by Infrastructure Australia during 2009, the Government would have been poorly placed to respond to the serious challenges it faced. The stimuli did much to ameliorate the impacts of the slowdown in the resources industries by providing alternative engineering employment in infrastructure projects. There has been some flow-through to reduce engineering skills shortages but there are, nevertheless, still significant shortages as evidenced by the continuing strong demand for skilled migrants.
Consequently, membership of Engineers Australia continued to grow strongly during the year with record numbers of direct entries into the Member grade i.e. members who did not upgrade from Graduate. Membership reached an all-time high of 88,560 at 30 June 2009.
The healthy enrolments and participation in the professional development program leading to Chartered Status may also have contributed as may have the Australian Government sponsored Professional Year program for migrant engineers conducted on our behalf by our subsidiary, Engineering Education Australia.
There was active involvement by members during the year, in Australia and overseas, in many workshops and forums conducted to prepare a new strategic plan for the period 2010-2011 to 2014-2015. This process will undoubtedly result in a much more finely tuned plan that will be the subject of further wide consultation prior to its consideration for adoption by the Council and the National Congress in November 2009.
Our annual reports of recent years have benefited greatly by adopting many of the principles of the highly regarded Global Reporting Initiative. The efforts of Les Wallace, in particular, in progressively incorporating the many improvements were recognised by the awarding of a Bronze Certificate for our 2007-2008 Annual Report at the 2009 Australasian Reporting Awards.
None of the achievements of 2008-2009 would have been possible without the combined efforts of our many volunteers and relatively small number of staff. National Presidents, Julie Hammer and Peter Godfrey, led by example throughout their respective parts of the year. They were very well supported by the staff directors in the Executive Team who have helped build a very sound working environment and culture that we can all be
proud of.
Peter Taylor FIEAust CPEng
Chief Executive
