AUSTRALIA is a migrant nation.
Through blood, sweat and tears, migrants became the backbone and leaders of subsequent generations.
I hear their stories as deputy chair of the Joint Standing Committee on Migration, a federal parliamentary committee that is reviewing migration’s role in nation building.
This week’s leak of the Albanese government’s potential plans on immigration again highlighted that Labor either doesn’t get the regions or is raiding them to bolster their capital-city electoral stocks.
Employers are warning of a skilled foreign worker drain from the regions if Labor allows skilled migrants to leave their visa sponsor sooner.
Labor’s previous zoning changes for international medical graduates in regional Australia saw a 57 per cent increase in those doctors leaving regions for urban areas.
Next it will be nurses, aged care staff, teachers, mechanics and more if Labor’s reported discussion paper becomes law.
If the leaked plans are to be believed, workers on $120,000 could be brought into the country within days, not months, yet the low-paid care sector workers earning under $70,000 would come in under “extensive regulation and union oversight” because it is supposedly “too easy” for them to get in.
The Swan Hill district and Mallee have had great trouble securing workers, emerging from the pandemic and related border restrictions.
This week’s unemployment data stands at a low 3.7 per cent nationally, 3.5 per cent in Victoria and, as of July, 2.4 per cent here in Victoria’s north-west.
The former Coalition government’s Pacific Australia Labor Mobility scheme has helped in agriculture, as would the agriculture visa had the incoming Labor government not put that on ice.
In regional Australia, we need labour in health, horticulture and hospitality to name but a few, but it looks like, yet again, under Labor it’s red tape for the regions and the red carpet for the capital cities.
