Restaurant and Catering Industry Association of Australia (RCIAA) chief executive Wes Lambert was one of the first lobby groups to praise the government-led Joint Standing Committee on Migration’s recommendations to allow Australian businesses easy access to cheap foreign labour.
To recap, the Committee recommended:
- Significantly watering down or outright abolishing labour market testing rules, depending on the business.
- Massively expanding the range of roles listed on the skills shortage list.
- Cutting visa costs for employers, alongside accelerating visa approval times.
- Giving temporary foreign workers a surefire pathway to permanent residency.
- Giving temporary foreign workers priority access to flights and hotel quarantine ahead of stranded Australians.
RCIAA’s Wes Lambert strongly backed the recommendations, claiming the reforms provide the hospitality industry with the workers they need and would help overcome skills shortages:
“The interim recommendations in the report set out a vision for the hospitality sector to help them get the skilled workers they need to keep tens of thousands of Australian workers in jobs.”
“R&CA strongly believes that skilled migration should not become a political football and called upon all parties in the Parliament to support the interim report’s recommendations.”
Hilariously, at the same time as Wes Lambert is calling for unrestricted access to foreign workers, he is demanding taxpayer subsidies to prevent thousands of Australians from losing their jobs:
Hospitality and tourism leaders have broadly condemned Mr Morrison’s tourism stimulus, which centred on half-price airline tickets to government-picked holiday destinations…
Restaurant and Catering chief executive Wes Lambert said: “The JobMaker initiative has failed. That support should be given to tourism, the arts, aviation and hospitality — the sectors hit worst by COVID.”
Stephen Ferguson, chief executive of the Australian Hotels Association, has also put his hand out for subsidies, penning an article in The Australian calling for either an extended cash flow boost or staff retention payments after JobKeeper ends this month:
A recent ABS report, drawing on the Tax Office’s single-touch payroll system over the week to February 27, showed there were still 110,000, or 12 per cent, fewer payrolled employees in hotels, restaurants and cafes than before the pandemic hit early last year.
Only two in three hospitality jobs had been regained by the end of last month, the ABS reported…
Something is clear amiss here. On the one hand, the hospitality industry has incurred massive job losses and needs ongoing wage subsidies to keep workers employed and businesses afloat.
At the same time, the industry faces skills shortages and needs to import cheap foreign workers.
Talk about a contradictory position.
The only thing certain here is that the hospitality industry is talking its own book. It wants free money from taxpayers alongside lower wage costs via easy access to migrant slave labour. All this from an industry that is already a leader in migrant wage theft and casualisation (e.g. here and here).
The Coalition’s proposed immigration reforms would make the situation worse and further displace local workers.
