MELBOURNE, Australia (Commonwealth Union)_ The world’s longest COVID lockdown left its mark on Australia’s second largest city, as evidenced by the abundance of “For Lease” billboards and vacant office buildings in Melbourne.
Even as the pandemic recedes globally, Victoria’s state capital still requires assistance. Last month, a state-wide rebate program was reinstituted to assist Victoria’s COVID-devastated entertainment, hotel, and tourism industries. However, a completely other issue now faces the city, the state, and the country. Businesses in a nation that was once thought of as an “immigrant nation” are struggling to fill half a million job openings after two years of strict border closures.
According to Paul Guerra, CEO of the Victorian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, the state’s largest business lobby, this is “the one problem that is top of the pile everywhere I’ve been around the state over the last six weeks, whether it has been in metropolitan or remote Victoria.” The only way to address these shortfalls, according to the firms we are hearing from, is through migration, he told Nikkei Asia. “This is urgent right now for Australia.”
First- or second-generation immigrants make up nearly half of the population of Australia. The island continent had the second-largest contingent labour force in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development prior to the epidemic.
Australia currently has the second worst labour shortage in the industrialized world, after only Canada, where immigration accounts for almost all of the increase in the labour force. The country’s hospitality, child care and elderly care, health, education, and IT industries are all experiencing shortages.
Melbourne is suffering from a labour shortage after a record number of residents fled the city to avoid the oppressive lockdowns. The city’s population of about 5 million fell by 60,500 in a single year due to strict COVID containment efforts and a lack of pandemic relief for the nation’s temporary migrants and overseas students. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, this decline was more than that of any other state capital in the country.
