LIFTING Australia's permanent skilled migration cap has been welcomed, but may not address staff shortages for small and medium regional businesses, the head of the Hunter's business chamber says.
The federal government announced on Friday at its Jobs and Skills that the country's permanent migration cap would be increased by 35,000 to 195,000 this financial year in an effort to appease worker shortages across the nation. Regional Australia will have access to 34,000 of the places, an increase of 9000. But Business Hunter's CEO Bob Hawes said the scheme would be unsuitable to a lot of small to medium Hunter traders.
"They're not necessarily a panacea for small to medium sized businesses, because it's a fairly decent process to have to get involved with it and it costs money," he said. "So what we see is some of the mining industry and some of the bigger engineering companies do access these schemes because they're able to attract the people.
"Rather than coming to a regional area they're coming to a big name company, or something that stands out of having a long term reputation for being involved in supporting the skilled migration programs.
"Because there's a lot of different aspects to it. It's not just a matter of Australia putting an ad out there that says engineers wanted and then they just arrived at Mascot and they just feather out from there."
However Mr Hawes said the widespread worker demand had spurred more interest in the program of late.
"In the last 12 months, we've had more inquiries from businesses that have never been involved with it before that want to investigate it," he said. "They're interested in it, because they've reached the end of trying to source skilled labour from the local market."
He also believed the Hunter could receive a flow-on benefit from the boost. Mr Hawes said overseas workers were typically more attracted to capital cities, which could drive more Sydney residents to regions. Housing availability and affordability would be a factor, he said.
"There was some work done a little while ago, that was sort of suggesting that a lot of a large proportion of people that were moving to regions like Newcastle, particularly ones out of Sydney, weren't filling jobs here, they were coming here with jobs and then working remotely," he said. "Which is fine, because they're at the end of the day, they're contributing to our economy.
"But we're getting feedback that from businesses that have been trying to locate people in some of those regional areas into the Newcastle area, that's become fraught because of the affordability issue.
"We used to have a bit of an advantage compared to Sydney. In some respects, we've lost a little bit of that.
"So we're still getting calls from businesses to say, 'what can we do about this? I feel very helpless'.
"And it's very frustrating, because I don't have a magic wand when it comes to housing. But certainly, people are still interested in coming to the Hunter. There's no doubt that a blocker for that free movement. And hopefully, it's one that will be resolved into the medium term."
