Our Blog update for today discusses the latest increase in permanent immigration in Australia.
Australia’s government recently declared that in the current fiscal year it would raise its permanent immigration admissions by 35,000 to 195,000 as the nation struggles with skills and labour shortages.
Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil declared the addition for the year ending June 30, 2023, at a two-day summit of 140 representatives of governments, businesses, trade unions, and industry to handle skills shortages aggravated by the pandemic.
O’Neill stated that Australian nurses have been performing double and triple shifts for the last two years, cancellations of flights were taking place due to the lack of ground staff, and fruit was being left on trees to rot as there was no one to pick them up.
The minister further added that their priority is always Australian jobs first, which is why most of the summit was focused on training and women’s involvement, as well as other vulnerable groups.
She added that COVID’s impact has been so grave that even if they run through every other option, they will still be short of thousands of workers, at least in the short term.
O’Neill expressed that many of the “best and brightest minds” preferred to migrate to Canada, Britain, and Germany instead of Australia.
She explained that the immigration program in Australia was “fiendishly complex,” with over 70 unique visa programs, and that Australia would designate a panel to overhaul its immigration program in the national interest.
On the first day of the Jobs and Skills Summit, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced that 180,000 places would be offered in vocational education schools the following year at a cost of 1.1 billion Australian dollars to lower the nation’s skills shortage.
During the pandemic, Australia initially enforced some of the harshest restrictions on international travel for 20 months and cautiously reopened the borders to skilled workers in December last year.
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