Australia's labour crisis requires urgent government focus

Consider between December 2019 and December 2021, a total of 416,000 people, many skilled migrants among them, left the country. There are currently 500,000 job vacancies. We are at a net loss currently in terms of skilled labour, with an unemployment rate of 3.4 per cent, not seen since 1974.

The unions can protest all they like, but Australia has a working population of approximately 12 million, its workforce rapidly ageing. The aged care sector alone is crying out for workers, let alone the hospitality, engineering and IT industries to name but a few.

With visa processing queues at an all-time high and some 900,000 applications in the pipeline, circumstances could not be worse for Australia.

Bear in mind we are a country far from the rest of the world that had its borders closed far longer than some of our other western counterparts like the UK, USA and Canada. Despite the pandemic, global talent has been mobile for most of the last two-and-a-half years, but Australia has not proven to be an attractive destination, due to its closed doors.

We cannot deny any longer we are competing with the rest of the world for sought-after skills, as well as semi-skilled labour in areas such as agriculture.

So what solutions are available to government? Raising the number of permanent places is a long-term solution.

It is a laborious process which requires skills recognition and state approval in most cases and can take anything from 12 months to two years.

In a labour crisis we need to urgently be looking at short-term solutions, of which there are certainly many.

Take international students, for example, who have had their work rights temporarily relaxed to allow them to work full-time.

Many of this cohort are extremely skilled and have already added to a large percentage of our citizens over the years, post studies.

To encourage more to study here, we should remove the requirement to demonstrate they will return to their own country post-studies, which leads to subjective refusals and discourages many, including from Latin America, where we should be looking for diversity of our student population.

Additionally, we need to provide more pathways for international students to remain in Australia and use their vital skillsets for our economic good. Working holiday-makers could have their age limit raised to 45, thereby allowing those with long-term experience to test the waters and assist our skills shortage.

The medium-term solution is that which is being most impacted by the visa processing delays currently - the temporary skills shortage employer-sponsored visa. This permits employers to import skills from overseas and immediately have a workforce paying taxes into the economy and filling the skills shortages.

Waiting six months to obtain this type of visa is just far too long, for a visa that at one point took just 48-hours to turn around.

There are many occupations that could be added to the list for this temporary visa, including carers for the aged care sector. Then we could allow all of those on temporary employer-sponsored visas to apply for permanent residence after three years, rather than the select few at present.

READ MORE:

We could also remove the current onerous labour market testing requirement which simply wastes time and many would argue if you have a position as an employer you wish to fill with a candidate already in place, it goes against employment law to advertise for it.

The government's September jobs summit is a step in the right direction for addressing some of the medium- to long-term labour market issues but it's not going to result in the immediate fixes we desperately require.

Urgent consultation is required now with business and immigration experts, followed by swift action before businesses collapse and the economy stalls.