• In order to help address severe labour shortages, Australia is boosting its ceiling on permanent migration for the first time in ten years.
• This fiscal year, it will employ up to 195,000 employees, a 35,000 increase.
• The government claims that workers from key migration sources for Australia, such as China, India, and the UK, are required to fill these positions.

In order to help address severe labour shortages, Australia is boosting its ceiling on permanent migration for the first time in ten years.

This fiscal year, it will employ up to 195,000 employees, a 35,000 increase.

The pandemic and Australia’s strict border rules have made a number of sectors’ workforce shortages worse.

The government claims that workers from key migration sources for Australia, such as China, India, and the UK, are required to fill these positions.

Although there are more than 480,000 open positions nationwide, companies are finding it difficult to fill them because unemployment is at an almost 50-year low.

Industries that have been particularly heavily hit include those in hospitality, healthcare, agriculture, and skilled trades.

According to testimony given this week at a national jobs summit in Canberra, a lack of workers has caused havoc at airports, allowed the fruit to rot on trees, and put tremendous strain on hospitals.

Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil stated, “Our goal is always Australian jobs first… but the impact of Covid has been so severe that even if we exhaust every other option, we will still be many thousands of workers short, at least in the short term.

After peaking at over 190,000 per year in the middle of the 2010s, permanent migration started to decline in 2017 as immigration became a hot topic in politics.

However, advocates for business and labour have campaigned for an increase in immigration, as have political rivals.

A system that acknowledges that we are in a global war for talent is replacing one that is almost exclusively focused on how we keep people out, according to Ms O’Neil.

The increase includes an additional 9,000 positions for persons relocating to rural regions and 4,700 positions for healthcare professionals.

Additionally, the government has pledged A$36m ($24.4m; £21m) for additional workers to help reduce the large backlogs in visa processing.

The number of immigrants to Australia has increased by almost a million since 2016, despite the pandemic’s lowered migration.

More than half of the population in Australia was either born abroad or has an overseas-born parent for the first time, according to the census.

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