Anthony Albanese urged by NSW Treasurer Matt Kean to bring in of foreign workers: Jobs crisis

Anthony Albanese has been urged by the NSW government to bring in tens of thousands of low-skilled foreign workers to fill the many job vacancies across the country, even while locals are still receiving Covid leave payments for not working.

The demand by NSW Treasurer Matt Kean was prompted by a new forecast predicting the state will be facing a shortfall of 304,000 employees by 2025-26. 

Australia’s reliance upon cheap foreign labour, including backpackers and overseas students, was exposed when borders were closed during the worst of the Covid pandemic.

While those workers are trickling back, many businesses are complaining about staff shortages, particularly as the high number of employment vacancies has created heightened expectations of wage levels among job seekers.

Exacerbating the shortages has been the government’s continued doling out of Covid pandemic leave payment to those who say they cannot work due to the need to isolate, long after the worst of coronavirus has passed.

Workers can still collect as much as $750 a week for having to isolate due to possible Covid exposure, and this scheme will continue until at least the end of September.

NSW Treasurer Kean says the federal government should start ‘stamping passports’ as soon as possible as businesses continue to suffer.

‘The Commonwealth doesn’t need to wait for a jobs summit, it doesn’t need to ask the unions for permission, it doesn’t need to wait for an October federal budget; it needs to make the call to start stamping passports today,’ he wrote in The Australian. 

‘I’ve been briefed that there are tens of thousands of skilled workers just waiting to be approved to come to Australia and work.’

He added that ‘practical solutions’ were available to speed up the process including boosting the number of skilled visas or creating a new visa specifically designed for low-skilled jobs.

NSW Skills Minister Alister Henskens has also called for an increase in the number of skilled foreign workers being brought into the country. 

He claimed the NSW government had exhausted all options to fix the crisis before slamming the federal Labor government for ‘prioritising’ unions over businesses.

Australia is currently experiencing the second-worst skills crisis in the world, according to data from the latest OECD economic outlook.

A report from KPMG showed the country did not record any net increase to skilled worker migration during the 2021 to 2022 period. 

It also revealed there were more than 500,000 less foreign workers in Australia compared to before the Covid pandemic. 

NSW, the country’s most populous state, is continuing to feel the brunt of the economic pain with 93 per cent of businesses in the state revealing in a recent Workforce Skills Survey by Business NSW, that they were struggling to find staff.

Mr Albanese will address the matter at a jobs summit in Parliament House on September 1 and 2. 

But the Prime Minister has tempered expectations about potential improvements to Australia’s skills crisis following his announcement of the upcoming jobs summit.

He told Sky News interview on Sunday that his government has more modest expectations.

‘What we are interested in is making sure that we can have improvements in enterprise bargaining, that we can focus there on productivity, and we can focus on ways in which business and unions come together,’ he said.