Vikki Campion: Labor’s planned changes to skilled a migration a disaster for regional areas

Food won’t be picked, meals won’t be cooked and patients won’t be cared for are just some of the implications of changes to the skilled migration plan, writes Vikki Campion.

In many sectors, a labour force in regional Australia without overseas workers would not exist.

If people didn’t come in, fruit wouldn’t be picked, meals wouldn’t be cooked, and patients wouldn’t be cared for.

Yet Labor thinktanks that inform ministers who have meetings with union officials are making moralistic judgments on $70,000 wages and implementing a solution that will, in a little over a month, create a major problem.

The tone inferred from the Albanese Government’s change to the Temporary Skilled Migration Income Threshold post-budget was grim: Nasty employers luring unskilled foreigners to exploit, based only on a perversion to underpay, and redemption would be found by mandating a $70,000 salary.

Problem is the “unskilled” workers Albo’s ministry took a swipe at included nurses, of which we needed an extra 12,500 yesterday and the nasty employers, apparently taking advantage, overwhelmingly are the State Government’s, funded in part by the Federal Government’s own Primary Health Networks.

Labor’s Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil said increasing TSMIT (Temporary Skilled Migration Income Threshold) to $70,000 was “essential to ensuring this program is what it says it is: a skilled worker program, not a guest worker program”, and “around 90 per cent of all full-time jobs in Australia are now paid more than the current TSMIT”.

What she didn’t explain was who would be doing these jobs formerly filled by skilled migrants.

Belle, who I do not want to name in case of harming her application, is a 33-year-old UK nurse with family in Australia who flew here last month to complete her registration process to take a $65,000 a year 38 hour week enrolled nurse position at a Northern NSW hospital. She does not fit the Albanese inferred narrative of being exploited, unskilled or too stupid to logically decide to go overseas and work for a few years. So far, the process has taken her 1.5 years and £5000 on bureaucracy, paperwork and flights, which she hopes will be worth it – but under the TSMIT changes, she will earning too little to qualify.

“The wages are better, the weather is better, I have a support network in Australia, and living in Australia is something we have wanted to do for ages,” she says. “The new threshold puts the spanner in the works. It is going to be rough to get it done because of the deadline.”

Nursing staff and Belle were trying to rush her sponsorship application through before the June 30 deadline.

Belle is not an exploited little girl but a grown woman navigating the most complex migration act in the world to have a shot at living in Australia. Surely she is entitled to make her own choice. If nurses from overseas thought they didn’t make enough money here, they wouldn’t come

The government’s advice on this change comes from the Grattan Institute, which told Labor, incorrectly that “Skilled workers such as nurses, … would still qualify for temporary sponsorship under a $70,000 wage threshold.”

That is not true for Belle or for the hundreds of advertised vacancies for regional NSW nurses, including a full-time enrolled nurse doing 38 hours a week in the Mental Health Inpatient Unit at the Broken Hill Hospital yesterday advertised for $60,704.55 to $65,958 under the Public Health System Nurses & Midwives (State) Award.

Or the enrolled nurses on the same wage from Boorowa to Coonabarabran who are told in the job application script that “key challenges” would be to display “resilience and courage” as well as “prioritising competing workload demands given the scope of rural practice and reliance on nursing staff”. Which is probably a good explanation as to why we are looking around the world for people to do it.

Albo might be experienced but his team’s squeaky newness is naive to broader Australia. It is not enough to sit up in Parliament House and talk to a metro union boss and a metro academic and a metro journalist who think looking at a statistic tells the whole story. You actually need to go out into electorates that aren’t your own and talk to people doing the jobs.

There are 12,417 nursing jobs advertised right now, and with our population ageing and migration apparently soaring, the shortage is set to get a hell of a lot worse.

The reasoning in the budget to increase the TSMIT to $70,000 is to “reflect the level it would have reached if it was indexed to wages when it was last adjusted 10 years ago”. Head chefs in Armidale, Cairns, Port Douglas are today advertised for under $70,000, along with carpenters and cabinet makers, electricians, hairdressers and bakers from Gilgandra to Roma. Labor pays its own staff in electorate offices less than $70,000 by the way, so either they are surrounded by incompetence, or it’s the appropriate wage.

This change to the migration threshold will wipe out how many people in the bush could have been recruited. Ms O’Neil told journalists in Canberra that skill shortages had often been based on “unverified claims by employers” and that training may be the solution rather than migration.

We can pay farm workers $100,000 a year if you are prepared to pay $10 for an apple. And similarly, we can pay pub chefs $100,000 a year, but get ready for the pub meal to be $80 a hit. But the government overwhelmingly pays nurses, and the government is paid by you, so if they deserve to be paid more, than you have to be prepared to pay it.

If the government should be lifting the wage on anything, it should be regional nurses working in understaffed hospitals. In the federal budget, Albanese pledged $125.8 million to strengthen the migration system “to ease critical skills shortages across the economy and build a more productive workforce” – yet for health, this will have the opposite effect. The mark of success of this policy is Belle won’t be allowed in to look after you in hospital.

Originally published as Vikki Campion: Labor’s planned changes to skilled a migration a disaster for regional areas