The AFR View
No populist overreaction against immigration
While talking up limiting overseas arrivals, Labor has largely maintained a demand-driven temporary skilled worker program.
Thankfully, the populist hoo-ha over Australia’s post-pandemic population surge that has helped fill labour shortages as the borders have reopened has not escalated into a bigger political overreaction that slashes immigration.
The one-off catch-up in returning foreign students, international backpackers and other migrants has pushed up the record rate of arrivals to over half a million in the past year. But that population surge, which is now likely to have peaked and will return to normal, has left Australia’s population no bigger today than was projected before the pandemic stopped migration for two years.
But the immigration catch-up has been scapegoated for the housing crisis and been politically weaponised by the Coalition to claim the migration was out of control under Labor.
While talking up limiting overseas arrivals, Labor has largely maintained a demand-driven temporary skilled worker program. Peter Rae
The purpose of Labor’s migration review, headed by the former head of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet Martin Parkinson, was to fix the “broken” skilled worker visa system rather than play politics with the overall migrant intake. To its credit, Labor’s migration strategy revamp has resisted the anti-bigger Australia pressure that might have encouraged imposing a hard cap on temporary migrant numbers.
Instead, Labor is managing the politics by taking credit for the end of the surge by pointing to its abolishing special extended-stay COVID visas and a seemingly justified crackdown on questionable practices on the fringes of the higher education sector to weed out student visa holders that come here to work, not study. Yet, while talking up limiting overseas arrivals, Labor has largely maintained a demand-driven temporary skilled worker program.
Hence, Labor’s new three-tiered income-based “skills in demand” visa system has been welcomed on the whole by business groups. At the top end, a “specialist skills pathway” promises to help Australia compete in the global war for talent – and it is good to hear Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil talking in these terms – by cutting visa approval times to an average of seven days for highly skilled migrants filling jobs earning above $135,000.
The political sop to Labor’s union paymaster is the carve-out of skilled tradespeople from the fast-tracked visa process. Highly paid tradies, mostly employed in the mining and construction sectors, will instead have to apply for entry under the “core skills” visa stream covering the bulk of temporary skilled migrants, which will be bureaucratically administered based on a data-driven skills shortage occupation list.
New rules permitting temporary visa holders to switch employers also respond to union allegations of exploitation of cheap foreign workers, which supposedly undercuts the jobs, pay and conditions of Australian workers. Yet Labor’s migration dilemma is underscored by the seeming intention to limit the “essential skills pathway” for lower-paying jobs to aged care and disability services workers.
Like the decision to continue to allow backpackers working in the regions in jobs such as picking fruit to extend their visas, the reality is that Australia will continue to need foreign workers to do the jobs that Australians can’t or won’t do.
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