Immigration Boost Needed To Tackle Skills Shortage

PRLog (Press Release) – Mar 19, 2008 – Adding to the problems of a booming economy is Australia's looming labour shortage.

A paper prepared for the Academy of Social Sciences Experts say the country needs to boost immigration by 30 per cent within the next 20 years to meet its growing work force demand.

Many job vacancies will be created when millions of baby boomers retire. They will also create the need for more workers to care and cater for them as they age.

Australia has always relied on immigration to fill jobs and keep its economy growing, but there are now signs the level of immigration will have to ramped up to stop a skills shortage getting worse.

Manpower recruitment company spokesman Steve Hinch says the skills shortage is already upon us.

"We have 260,000 vacant jobs across this country at the moment," he said.

Australian National University demography professor, Peter McDonald, has been examining Australia's population and future labour force needs.

He says rising fertility and immigration levels are not enough to keep the work force growing.

"Over the last 20 years or so, we've had a growth rate as high as about 2 per cent, and it's now down to about 1.2 per cent per annum," he said.

"If it were to be 1 per cent per annum from now on, the levels of immigration required would be higher than they are now.

"At the moment, they're higher by historical standards."

Professor McDonald says that migration over the next 20 years would need to go up by about 50,000 per year, from about 170,000 to 220,000 each year.

"Later on, after 20 years, it would be going up again to up around 300,000," he said.

"We also say it's very important to consider domestic skills, that we need to be looking at the production of skills within Australia as well.

"But the notion is that because of increased living standards, because of the need to renew a lot of infrastructure in Australia, because of the ageing of the population - a lot of different reasons - we expect the demand for labour in the future to remain very strong."

Baby boomer 'holes'

Mr Hinch says the retirement of 3.5 million baby boomers will leave holes that need to be filled and create more demand for jobs at the same time.

"There will be more to cater for a larger number of really, relatively well-cashed up retirees that are looking to enjoy their life," he said.

"There will be a lot more support jobs... a lot of the older, ageing population that are currently in their 60s, will be in their late 70s, and 80s at that period.

"There will be more need for medium to low-skilled home care assistants and even just in-house care for ironing and those kind of things to assist with an ageing population.

"There will be certainly a massive need for re-skilling and introduction of more nurses, both at the home care level and in the hospice-type level.

"But for the younger boomers that are still going to spend all their money for another 20 years after that and have fun, there will be an increase in the service industry - from cafes to hairdressers and a lot of those things that require people."

A long queue of willing immigrants has formed behind Australia's skilled migration scheme.

But Professor McDonald says the bigger challenge is to fill the lower skilled jobs. He is proposing an arrangement with small island nations.

"What we're saying is that there's some of our neighbour countries - the Pacific islands, East Timor - have excess labour," he said.

"All of those countries are very interested in a temporary worker scheme in coming to Australia.

"What we're proposing is that workers could come in on a temporary basis for say, five years and then - so long as they had performed well - become permanent residents.

"So we don't really want to move away from the emphasis upon permanent migration in the long-term."

- Simon Lauder, ABC News

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