By Ross Stitt*
‘We are the new Love Island. If you’re a single Brit, come on out because you might not be single for long.’
That’s what Paul Papalia, the Minister of Police for Western Australia, told The Times in his sales pitch to attract British coppers down under.
London’s Evening Standard reported that ‘leaflets showing smiling officers in scuba-diving gear and sandy beaches’ were placed on chairs at Papalia’s recruitment meetings, together with packs of Australian Tim Tams.
At a practical level, the vastly superior pay and conditions in Western Australia may prove the greatest attraction to pommy police officers. According to The Times, recruits with at least three years’ experience will start in WA ‘on a basic salary of about £50,000 compared with £30,000 for a constable with five years’ experience in the UK’.
It’s no wonder that over 800 police officers have already responded to WA’s pitch.
And it’s not just the police department that Papalia is recruiting for. He went to the UK and Ireland in search of doctors, nurses, teachers, electricians, and engineers. He had over 30,000 vacancies to fill.
His prospects are looking pretty good. The Times reported that the pay in WA across those occupations is at least 50% higher than in the UK and in some cases more than double.
That’s before you factor in the lifestyle advantages.
It’s clear that the international competition for workers, particularly skilled workers, is becoming more intense. According to a recent speech at the Australian Financial Review Workforce Summit, the Australian government is acutely aware that it needs to lift its game if the country is to remain attractive to skilled immigrants from around the world.
The speech was delivered by Clare O’Neil, the Minister for Home Affairs. She argued that ‘Australia’s migration system is broken. It is unstrategic. It is complex, expensive, and slow. It is not delivering for business, for migrants, or for our population.’
This withering critique is undoubtedly attributable to the fact that O’Neil’s party has been in power for less than a year. Nevertheless, she made some important points.
The key point is that the focus of Australia’s immigration system has shifted over time from permanent migrants working toward citizenship to temporary migrants, often unskilled, with no path to citizenship. O’Neil highlighted the following anomaly.
‘Today, it is relatively easy for a low skill, temporary migrant to come to Australia, but difficult, slow and not particularly attractive for a high-skill, permanent migrant to come here. We’ve got the system backwards. This focus on temporariness means that migrants cannot truly flourish.’
The following graph from the Australian Population Centre provides a breakdown, past and projected, of migrant arrivals by visa type. (These are gross not net arrivals).
According to these projections, permanent arrivals will be lower in 2026 than they were in 2017 – significantly lower as a percentage of total population. By contrast, both temporary and student arrivals will be higher.
The temporary versus permanent balance isn’t the only problem O’Neil identified. She complained that Australia trains many international students but then requires too many of them to leave, it fails to properly recognise the skills and qualifications that immigrants earn overseas, and the occupation lists it uses to determine workforce needs are out of date.
O’Neil also criticized the system’s bureaucracy. She said that the combination of complexity, cost and delay is ‘making Australia an unattractive destination for the workers we really want and need’. She provided the stunning example of Brian Schmidt, Nobel prize winner and academic, whose migration to Australia in 1994 was processed in just four days. A similar candidate today would probably have to wait six months and outlay thousands of dollars to get a visa decision.
O’Neil stressed international competition is dictating the urgent need for change.
‘Other countries are driving the war for talent, relentlessly identifying the skills they need, finding them around the world, and inviting those migrants to join their national endeavours.’
The Labor government’s plan to address the current problems includes:
- rebalancing the temporary and permanent mix of migrants,
- refocusing on skilled migrants,
- being more proactive in selling Australia to the migrants the country needs,
- fixing the bureaucracy, and
- better coordinating the labour market, the education system and the migration system.
The government has already increased the permanent migration cap by 35,000 to 195,000. Some critics say this is not enough. Nathan Sabherwal of recruitment agency Randstad Australia points to the example of Canada which has a much more ambitious migration program. With a population about 50% larger than Australia’s, Canada is planning for 465,000 new permanent residents in 2023, 485,000 in 2024, and 500,000 in 2025.
There’s no doubt that immigrants, foreign students, and international backpackers have flooded back into Australia since the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic passed. It is now expected that the projections in last year’s budget for net migration in the year to 30 June 2023 will be exceeded by a significant margin.
The federal government has shown itself willing to cooperate with state governments to assist attracting foreign workers. For example, as part of Western Australia’s current recruitment drive in the UK, Canberra did a deal enabling British police officers to get permanent resident status immediately and to apply for citizenship after four years.
That’s the type of practical action required to help ease current labour shortages across the Australian economy. The most sought-after migrants have choices. Many of them won’t come down under unless Australia simplifies the entry process and provides a clear path to citizenship. The government seems determined to facilitate this.
The other key issue of course is remuneration levels. Australian pay is emerging as a major draw card, at least in the market for British migrants.
That plus the promise of sun, sex, and scuba-diving. And Tim Tams.
*Ross Stitt is a freelance writer with a PhD in political science. He is a New Zealander based in Sydney. His articles are part of our 'Understanding Australia' series.
We welcome your comments below. If you are not already registered, please register to comment
Remember we welcome robust, respectful and insightful debate. We don't welcome abusive or defamatory comments and will de-register those repeatedly making such comments. Our current comment policy is here.