Why foreigners fear working Down Under and how it’s affecting our skills shortage

Tens of thousands of workers want to come and stay in Australia but there is one factor stopping them.

Hopes that the reopening of international borders would ease Australia’s worsening skills shortage have been tempered by fears that fewer migrants now want to come here.

Global Work and Travel chief executive officer Jurgen Himmelmann believes Australia’s Covid lockdowns, labelled as some of the strictest in the world, have left overseas workers sceptical about entering the country and anxious that a new virus outbreak may leave them stranded here indefinitely.

“Since the borders have opened, we are seeing the same volume of people wanting to leave Australia (as pre-Covid) but not the same number of people wanting to come to Australia,” Himmelmann says.

“We were expecting there to be some pent-up demand – that people would want to rush to Australia once everything opened up.

“But people (overseas) saw Australians being jailed for (breaking Covid quarantine laws). They saw people trapped (in a different state and unable to return home).

“Australia had a very hard stance on Covid that was different to the rest of the western world and that has had a material impact (on people now wanting to come to Australia).”

Australia’s Covid lockdowns, labelled as some of the strictest in the world, have left overseas workers sceptical about entering the country.

NEEDS MET ELSEWHERE

Australia’s borders closed to foreigners in March, 2020, and only fully reopened earlier this year.

Himmelmann says much softer border controls were in place during the pandemic in countries such as the US, the UK and Canada, allowing workers wanting to move away from their homeland to get their fix elsewhere.

“Australia isn’t unique in having a worker shortage – we aren’t any different to the UK and Canada,” he says.

“Most parts of Europe never did a hard border closure so a lot of the people that had an eagerness to travel just went somewhere (other than Australia).”

Aussie workers, however, have largely been confined to home for the past three years, and are now keenly seeking opportunities elsewhere, Himmelmann says.

Overseas recruiters have seized on this with marketing campaigns directed at Australians.

In May, the London Ambulance Service travelled to Sydney and Melbourne to interview paramedic science graduates to boost its workforce, of which one-quarter already originate from Australia.

Brian Schroder, CEO of WorkinAUS.

READY TO MOVE

Brian Schroder, chief executive officer of recruitment tech start-up WorkinAUS, disputed that there is a reluctance to travel to Australia and says there’s a large, ready-to-move pool of overseas jobseekers willing to help solve the country’s labour shortages.

He says YouGov research, commissioned by WorkinAUS, found 750,000 people aged 21-35 years in the UK and Ireland “could leave (for Australia) immediately if the right opportunity came up”.

“There are currently more than 70,000 overseas workers who have been granted working holiday-maker visas but not yet arrived in Australia,” Schroder says.

“With faster processing times than other visas, and the ability to attract a broad range of skills and experiences, the potential there alone is very powerful.”

NOT WORRIED

Sophia Sinclair, 25, is among the foreign workers looking to come to Australia and will travel from Scotland in the new year, having already secured a role as a recruitment consultant.

Sinclair, who currently works in the UK as an accounting assistant, hopes lockdowns will be a distant memory by the time she relocates but, even if they are reinstated, says it’s “not a big deal”.

Scotland’s Sophia Sinclair, 25, is among the foreign workers looking to come to Australia in the new year for work.

“My dad was stuck in Dubai for a year (during) lockdowns,” she says.

“I was locked in a different city from where I work for three months. I know it was just a different city, not a different country, but I’ve experienced it before so I’m not worried.

“Australia just seems very interesting and so different to (the UK) and that’s something I’m looking for – a big change.”

PUSH AND PULL OF WORKERS

• One in three workers in Australia was born overseas and one in five holds either a temporary or permanent visa.

• People who received a permanent visa after 2000 make up 12 per cent of the Australian workforce. Temporary migrants makeup 7 per cent of the Australian workforce.

• Migrants who stay in Australia are more likely to work full-time compared to the Australian population. More than half are employed full-time and just one in five are out of the labour force, compared to one in three Australian-born adults.

• At any one time, there’s about one million Australians living and working overseas.

Source: Grattan Institute and Services Australia