Introduction

Australia is planning to increase its annual skilled migration cap to fight critical labor shortages in the country.

The federal government could permit between 180,000 to 200,000 skilled migrants into Australia every year. But the federal government made decision to raise Australia’s permanent migration cap by 35,000 which has been greeted by migrant workers and visa applicants. Though some concerns have been upraised about visa backlogs and worker exploitation protections.

The changes to Australia’s skilled migration intake cap are expected to be formally announced in the October 25 Budget. The current migration cap is set at 160,000 spaces, which has encouragedwell-known calls from businesses and industries for accumulating skilled migration to Australia. The Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (ACCI) also supported increasing skilled migration to 200,000 a year to boost up Australia’s post-pandemic economic regaining. Increasing the skilled migration ceiling to up to 200,000 places would see Australia allow more qualifications and employments from other countries.

Before the Covid-19 pandemic, between 120,000 to 150,000 skilled migrants arrived in Australia every year. To give statements about economy-wide skills shortages, Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil said, the country would rise the cap to 195,000 this financial year.

“This could mean thousands more nurses settling in the country this year, thousands more engineers,” she said at day two of the jobs and skills summit.

“For the first time in our history, Australia is not the destination of choice for many of our skilled migrants.

“Those best and brightest minds, who are on the move around the world, they are looking to live in countries like Canada, Germany and UK, and those countries are rolling out a red carpet to welcome them in.”

The immigration minister, Andrew Giles, said the government will expend $36.1m to hire 500 more staff in the home affairs department to clear a visa application backlog that now expanses to 900,000.

Earlier, Chalmers, defined the new migration cap as a “cautious and responsible lift to permanent migration”, favorably it would not be used as a “replacement for training” or done in “isolation” of rule to house new migrants.

The government will broaden the responsibility of the national housing infrastructure capacity to release $575m for investment in social and reasonable housing, including through interesting private capital and superannuation funds.

O’Neil told the summit that there was almost “universal” funding for lifting migration numbers, emphasizing that Labor would shift “away from the focus on short-term migrants, toward permanency, citizenship and nation building”.

About 34,000 areas of the 195,000 cap for the 2022-23 financial year will be in the provinces, an increase of 9,000, O’Neil said.

O’Neil agreed to letting international student graduates stay and “work in Australia for longer”.

Migration cap to prioritize skilled workers

Australia’s permanent migration program for 2022-23 is capped at 160,000 places. While the places for 2021-22 – also capped at 160,000 – were split almost evenly between skilled and family migrants, workers will be prioritized in the government’s latest plan.

Following year, more than two-thirds of the transients anticipated to reach in Australia will be from seven of the different talented visas available. But there are calls by both commerce campaign bunches and unions to lift the movement cap to 200,000 over the following two a long time to encourage ease setbacks in numerous workplaces. Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles encourages reestablishing movement levels but said he did not accept it would unravel all of the issues in battling industries.

“It is important to get our migration flows back to where they were before the pandemic, and that will clearly be part of the solution,” he told the Seven Network on Tuesday,

“But the lessons that we have to learn from the last few years of having had the border closures is we’ve simply not been training enough of our own people.”

His comments come after a new survey commissioned by the Electrical Trades Union that revealed only 52 per cent of electrician apprentices completed their qualifications – with more than a third considering quitting.

Professor Seet said while domestic training is beneficial, those who are willing to take on jobs that are in need of filling are not always in Australia, making the country’s labor shortage issue “complicated”.

“You can throw as much money at the training and the skill side of things, but if the horse doesn’t want to drink – if your Australians don’t want those jobs – and if the employer doesn’t want to use additional incentives to encourage the horse to drink the water, then you will have these other issues, where you have to bring in another horse,” he said.

What are the ‘jobs of the future’?

According to the government’s Skill Priority List, the ‘jobs of the future’ that will be in demand on Australia’s job market are:

• Construction managers
• Civil engineering professionals
• Early childhood teachers
• Registered nurses
• ICT (information and communications technology) business and systems analysts
• Software and applications programmers
• Electricians
• Chefs
• Child carers
• Aged and disability carers

They’re described as a “mixed bag” of professions by Pi-ShenSeet, professor of entrepreneurship and innovation at Western Australia’s Edith Cowan University.

Professor Seet said Australia has had a long history of both training domestic workers and using skilled migration to fill gaps in numerousbusinesses, and it largely rely on supply and demand.

 

So definitely in near future we can hope to see some effective changes in Australia’s migration system which will enable stays for longer period of time with easy conditions.