This tells you all you need to know about Australia:
Yoga instructors, martial artists and dog handlers have beaten some construction trades to a spot on the government’s draft priority skills list for migrants, despite the dire need for workers to tackle the nation’s housing crisis.
As the government faces a shortfall of 90,000 construction workers to meet its target of 1.2 million new homes by the end of the decade, the latest list of occupations that can be fast-tracked into the country includes wellness professionals, but says more consultation is needed for trades including plumbers, bricklayers and cabinetmakers.
Parliament is locked in a fierce argument over the role of migration in housing affordability, with a debate over who qualifies for the overseas skills list being fought at the same time as the government strives to drive down the total number of people arriving in Australia while increasing the supply of homes.
It follows a stoush between the government and the building sector in December when tradies were left off the streamlined, high-skilled professional visa category amid union calls to ensure Australian jobs were prioritised.
To be clear, we should be training many more tradies.
However, it lieu of that, it makes no sense to exclude from your immigration program the very skilled people that you are most short of.
This tells us that both the government and unions know exactly what they are doing by feeding mass immigration into every other segment of the economy.
It is a deliberate strategy to crush wages, except for those under the protected umbrella.
Once again, this stoush’s fallout directly affects those who can afford it least: low-income households and youth.
Tradies should be included on the skills list.
Even better, scrap the list and use a wage floor of $120,000 to determine which kinds of skilled migrants make the cut.
If we did that, market prices would invert the flow of skilled migrants
It would be all tradies to build out Australia’s collapsed capital stock, while tertiary industries in services would no longer need anybody as demand shrank with immigration numbers.
After a time, this would lift living standards more widely via rising productivity, not just for a few corrupt unionists.
