Australia needs immigration to tackle skills shortage?

The article below is just a do-gooder opinion and is a lot of nonsense. Maybe a less airy-fairy educational system is needed and less generous welfare payments but immigration is entirely optional. China and India are undergoing rapid growth and they are not importing workers. They export workers! Japan's years of high growth were also 99% an indigenous Japanese effort. And with nearly 5% of the Australian workforce unemployed the sense of priorities here is crazy. There is plenty that could be done to get that 5% into work. In the long Menzies era, unemployment was generally under 2%. If Australia can manage that once it can do so again

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."

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Posted by John Ray