Article in today’s financial review:
Politics Federal Immigration Exclusive Permanent skilled workers to be top priority in immigration revamp Phillip Coorey Phillip CooreyPolitical editor Jul 20, 2022 – 5.00am
The Albanese government will prioritise the processing of almost 60,000 permanent visa applications lodged by skilled workers based overseas, in a bid to rapidly reduce areas of dire shortage such as health, education and aged care. The move is a down payment on an anticipated increase to the size and composition of the permanent migration intake, to be announced following the September jobs and skills summit.
“We arrived in this role with a huge visa backlog and no plan to work through it,” Clare O’Neil said. Elke Meitzel “We’ve got to get the system moving again, and then we have to have the deeper conversation,” Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil told The Australian Financial Review.
“There’s a really important conversation to be had about the size and composition of the migration program.” In the immediate term, stretched departmental resources will be diverted from processing the generally lower skilled permanent visa applications lodged by temporary visa holders already in Australia, so applications by more highly skilled workers overseas can go to the front of the queue.
Of the current total backlog of 961,016 visa applications across all categories, there are 560,187 lodged by people outside Australia. Of these, 57, 906 are skilled workers seeking permanent visas. These will be the new priority, especially teachers, health workers and aged care staff. There are another 13,806 offshore visa applicants seeking temporary visas. For the past two years, about 81 per cent of permanent visas were granted to those already in the country, but Ms O’Neil said the focus must change. “We arrived in this role with a huge visa backlog and no plan to work through it,” she said. “We’re doing everything we can through the existing program to alleviate this.”
But Ms O’Neil said there must also be longer-term changes to the permanent migration program that balanced the demands of business and the unions. The place for that to be thrashed out would be the jobs and skills summit in early September, she said. There will have to be trade-offs Before the pandemic, the Morrison government capped Australia’s total migration intake at 160,000 a year, but migration fell into net negative territory during the COVID-19 years, during which 600,000 temporary visa holders left, leaving large gaps health, construction and hospitality.
Business groups are demanding the cap be lifted to at least 200,000 for the next two years to help fix the labour and skills crisis. With unions wary about filling jobs with migrants, Ms O’Neill suggested there would have to be trade-offs with upskilling Australians.
“The voice of business is very important to migration but so is the voice of the union movement,” she said. “We don’t want to make the mistake of the past of using temporary migration to fix problems.
We need to train more Australians.” Ms O’Neill said there was a “once in a generation opportunity to step back and ask what the immigration system was for and ask whether the current system is meeting needs”.
She said the program was a productivity tool to not only help the country become a high-skilled, high wage economy by boosting manufacturing, science and teaching, but by buttressing the care and education sectors as well.
“We can drive a big economic transformation,” she said. Ms O’Neil also revealed steady progress was being made in processing the huge backlog of visa applications that developed while international borders were closed to foreign workers for almost two years because of COVID-19.
She said 623,000 temporary and permanent visa applications had been processed since June 1. Processing times for offshore permanent visa applicants had fallen from 11 months in May to four months in June.