It seems 15 years of turbo-charged ‘skilled’ permanent migration is not enough:
Today, the Regional Australia Institute has demanded the federal government expand Australia’s permanent migration program even further in a bid to ease skills shortages in the regions. From The ABC:
Expanding Australia’s permanent migration program would help regional communities tackle the plight of plummeting populations, according to a new report from a regional think tank…
“We’ve seen rural communities go from a place of population decline to 10 or 15 per cent population growth,” chief executive of the Regional Australia Institute, Jack Archer said.
“We’ve seen business be able to expand and we think that’s something that can be replicated around the country.”
The Regional Australia Institute wants the Federal Government to designate regional communities with worker shortages as ‘priority settlement areas’…
The Regional Australia Institute wants the Federal Government to expand so-called priority settlement areas and allow up to an extra 3,000 permanent migrants each year.
These would be in regional towns where there are worker shortages and a community that was willing to support new migrant arrivals…
It comes as the Federal Government contemplates changes to regional skilled visas, which would bind migrants to rural areas for a set period of time.
But Mr Archer said forcing people to live in regional areas would fail to deliver the outcomes regional communities needed.
“We want people to come to regional areas who have aspirations to work and live in those communities for the long term and so visa conditions that support them to do that is what we need,” he said.
“In the end, if you try to force people to do things it probably won’t get you the result you’re hoping for.”
Both the 2011 and 2016 Censuses revealed that 86% of migrants into Australia moved to the major cities, especially Sydney and Melbourne, with only a tiny fraction moving to regional areas.
Migrant support groups last week also attacked government plans to tie migrants to the regions as punitive and unfair.
Rather than raising the permanent migrant intake even further, a better solution would be to normalise Australia’s overall permanent migrant intake back to historical levels, while prioritising visas for regional communities via the proposed “priority settlement areas”. This would ease the extreme population pressures being felt in the major cities, which has become deeply unpopular within the electorate, while potentially improving the supply of migrant workers to the regions.
More broadly, we know Australia’s skilled permanent migration program is a fraud. Rather than easing genuine skills shortages in areas like the trades, the overwhelming majority of ‘skilled’ migrants have flooded professional areas like accounting and engineering, which are already heavily oversupplied. As such, it makes little sense to double down and increase the skilled migrant intake even further.
At roughly 200,000 people a year (including the humanitarian intake), Australia’s permanent migration program is already way too large to digest and places Australia on a path to 40 million people mid-century, which Australia does not need and the majority of Australians do not support.
