On Tuesday, we witnessed the absurdity of Australia’s ‘skilled’ visa system in glorious 8K colour, with construction trades omitted from the draft skills priority list for migrants, while yoga instructors, martial artists and dog handlers were included on the list.
It follows the exclusion of tradies from the streamlined skilled occupation visa category, amid union calls to ensure Australian jobs are prioritised.
It comes as the Albanese government’s target of building 1.2 million new homes over five years is in tatters, with shortages of construction workers a key barrier.
PropTrack’s Cameron Kusher rightly described the situation as a “clown show”:
Hilariously, the peak body for yoga instructors warned that Australia has a surplus of yoga practitioners that is stretching the industry and means wages are being reduced as a result.
“It means that senior teachers are finding it harder to get jobs or gigs that recognise the level of experience that they have”, Yoga Australia chief executive Josh Pryor said.
Yet, Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil defended the skilled occupation list.
“Our government feels strongly that for sectors like trades, you should have to prove that there is a skill shortage before you start to recruit overseas”, O’Neil said.
“If we don’t have enough electricians and farmers in our country, I believe that’s a failure of our training system”.
O’Neil’s comments don’t even make sense. Why does failures in our training system only apply to tradies and farmers, and not other professions like engineering, accounting, hospitality, yoga instructors, etc?
Matt Barrie gives a clue to what is really going on: the Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with India baked in the importation of yoga instructors and chefs four years ago:
So basically, the yoga instructor fiasco is another sop to India, much like the recently signed migration pacts that gives greater rights to Indians wishing to work and migrate to Australia than other nations.
Let’s get real for a moment. Australia’s faux ‘skilled’ migration system is literally engineered to create housing shortages.
We import masses of people into spurious people-servicing areas that aren’t suffering genuine shortages. These imported migrants add to housing demand without providing any real boost to the supply side.
Migrants are way underrepresented in the construction industry:
As a result, Australia continually finds itself short of housing and infrastructure, resulting in unaffordable housing and crush-loaded living standards.
Blind Freddy can see that Australia requires a much smaller migration intake that is focused on the skills the nation actually needs.
Net overseas migration must be calibrated to run at a level that is below the nation’s capacity to build housing and infrastructure.
Otherwise, housing will remain in perpetual crisis and living standards and productivity will continue to be crush-loaded.
