Overhauling migration policy to meet the demands of the Australian economy is one of the timely interventions that economists envisaged to help the nation’s recovery.
It is self-evident that no nation could hardly afford to return to the pre-pandemic economy and logically, reconfiguration of the post-pandemic economy demands substantial policy changes and structural reforms in the nation’s economy.
Although the Australia’s economy tracking better than the majority of the world, the Committee for Economic Development of Australia (CEDA) envisages trickling migration numbers are exposing skill shortages in many crucial sectors.
CEDA chief economist Jarrod Ball said Australia would lose out to nations such as Canada that are implementing “aggressive” migration policies to attract the best skilled migrants.
“The rapid slowing of migration brought about by COVID provides an opportunity to take stock of the current system and recalibrate for the future,” Mr Ball said in his opening statement.
“Our national unemployment rate remains elevated compared to pre-COVID levels but there are pockets of skills shortage.”
Mr Ball said there was a significant lack of skilled workers in sectors such as healthcare, tourism, hospitality, and trades.
According to CEDA, a migration system that ignores changing demand would make Australia less competitive in the global jobs market and inhibits its ability to attract talented workers from overseas.
Mr Ball noted Australia’s “rigid” migration system was not good at defining the skills needed for emerging sectors, such as data and technology.
“Occupations such as data scientist have not been easy to classify under our rigid skills classifications (system), and so we have got to find ways to ensure we are keeping up,” he said.
System assessing individual merits
The think tank has come out with the proposition of a system based on assessing individual merits and an online jobs platform to speed up applications.
“A number of other jurisdictions focus on the guarantee that there is a job at the other side,” Mr Ball said.
“(Our proposal) having migrants interact with employers is likely to lead to better employment outcomes once here in Australia.”
CEDA in its submission also advocated that the government needs to better align temporary skilled migration with education and training systems.
Global consulting group Ernst and Young (EY) also claimed that Australia faced a dire skills shortages across numerous industries.
According to a survey conducted by the group, 58 per cent of respondents said their business had skilled vacancies that were unable to be filled by local workers.
“Resumption of targeted skilled migration, including global talent, at scale is essential to economic recovery and to building Australia’s innovation economy longer term,” EY said in its submission.
EY also pointed out the fact that that the migration program was heavily bureaucratic and did not meet the needs of business and the economy. What it believed is that the nation’s migration program should be simplified.
It is noteworthy that a migration policy or job policy of a nation should be dynamic and needs to be upgraded from time to time , taking the needs of the business and the economy at large into consideration and if not nation will be left behind in the competitive global job market.
