For the better part of six months, the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) has stated continuously that it is committed to driving unemployment below 4.5% because lower unemployment is needed to drive wage growth above its current historically low level.
The RBA has also admitted that the closure of Australia’s international border and the loss of around 500,000 migrants is a key reason why Australia’s unemployment rate has fallen to its current decade low of 4.9% – still well above the RBA’s target level.
Yesterday, the chair of the parliamentary committee into skilled migration, Liberal MP Julian Leeser, shamelessly admitted that the government does not want lower unemployment and wage growth, hence it has committed to reopening the immigration floodgates:
“As a result of the pandemic half a million temporary visa holders left the country, many of which are skilled migrants.
“We have an unemployment rate of 4.9%, it’s been more than 10 years since we’ve seen an unemployment rate that low.
“But there are also record job advertisements right across the economy … job figures that were released only a couple of days ago indicated that ads are up 38% since the beginning of the pandemic.
“We do have in Australia endemic skill shortages in some parts of the economy. And it’s those skills shortages that need to be filled my migrants…
“There are many jobs in the economy that Australians don’t have the qualifications or the skills to do…
“Businesses told us that it is difficult to get skilled migrants here… the conditions are not necessarily attractive [without permanent residency]… For the business owner that’s trying to turn a buck… we just felt there needed to be clearer pathways to permanent residency for people that come here as skilled migrants filling skill shortages in the economy with skills that we don’t have”.
Only in the world of the Morrison Government is an unemployment rate below 5%, a strong jobs market, and decent wage growth seen as a bad outcome.
The above statement from Julian Leeser proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Coalition serves its business masters first and foremost, and that they don’t give a stuff about the welfare of Australian workers and households.
The Coalition’s modus operandi is to flood the labour market with cheaper migrant workers to fatten the wallets of its business mates.
