Leaders across business, health and tourism are calling on the new federal government to speed up approvals for skilled visa applications as they struggle with crippling labour shortages across the country.
As the premiers of New South Wales and Victoria unite in their calls for urgent action to approve more visas, industry leaders said longer-term plans should be made to train more Australians to fill roles to safeguard industries from future shocks.
Groups, including the Business Council of Australia, have also pushed for migration levels to be raised over the next two years to make up for the slump in incoming foreign workers during the pandemic.
The Australian Hotels Association’s head, Stephen Ferguson, said the decision to preclude foreign nationals from the jobkeeper scheme was partly to blame for the loss of workers from the industry in 2020.
“They all had to go home and now we’re in a global race with a whole heap of other countries trying to get these skills back as everyone opens up,” Ferguson said.
“Someone sitting in the Philippines or Mexico might go to Canada, the UK or New Zealand or wherever else instead of Australia.”
Ferguson said some AHA members have complained that skilled visas were taking five months to approve and there are not enough trained Australians to fill the positions.
NSW premier, Dominic Perrottet, this week said his focus was not on raising caps or targets but rather on getting the right people into the country quickly with a targeted migration scheme.
“Whether it’s construction, whether it’s many of the public service areas that we have where we are struggling for those skills because we’ve had our international borders closed for two years,” he said.
“What I’m advocating for is identification for state premiers to provide to the commonwealth those industries where there are clearly labour shortages that need to be addressed.”
He has also said the NSW government and Victoria’s premier, Daniel Andrews, “will be working very closely together with the prime minister to address that, and it needs to be addressed as soon as possible”.
A Victorian government spokesperson said it looked forward to working with the new federal government, saying it had a “clear commitment to tackling the skills and workforce shortage challenges across the economy”.
Hospitals and other health services have been among the sectors struggling with labour shortages, exacerbated by extra pressure from the early flu season, persistently high Covid cases and the long elective procedure backlog.
NSW Health secretary, Susan Pearce, last week revealed about 2,500 healthcare workers across the state were furloughed at any one time.
Australian Medical Association’s president, Dr Omar Khorshid, called on the federal government to expand its “very limited policy” to make it easier to recruit overseas-trained doctors.
“Staff are working very long hours under enormous pressure, leading to burnout, while patients are struggling to access services every day with operations being cancelled and services running at lower capacity,” he said.
The education sector has been struggling with furloughed staff due to the impacts of the current flu and Covid outbreaks.
The Australian Education Union’s federal president, Correna Haythorpe, said teacher shortages in public schools pre-dated Covid but were “particularly difficult now” due to illness-related absences.
Haythorpe said the Albanese government needed to focus on a national plan to reduce teacher shortages, describing it as a “crisis”.
The Australian Retailers Association’s chief executive, Paul Zahra, said some companies were being forced to operate with “skeletal” staff and limited opening hours.
In February there were almost 30,000 retail vacancies across the country, and the ARA expected that to keep climbing in a range of positions.
“While many of these are frontline roles, we are seeing a parallel skills crisis – with specialist skill sets such as e-commerce, digital transformation and merchandise planning in high demand,” he said.
