Albanese government will increase permanent migration to record 195,000

The federal government will increase the permanent migration intake from 160,000 to a record 195,000 places this year and speed up visas for foreign workers after Prime Minister Anthony Albanese warned of a backlog of almost 1 million people waiting for their applications to be decided.

The new work on the visa rules will be a key outcome in the final sessions of the government’s jobs and skills summit in Parliament House along with a consensus on lifting the permanent migration intake.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese arrives for the final day of the summit. Credit: James Brickwood

“We need to move towards more permanent migration because the over-reliance upon temporary labour has not only had a negative impact on wages, it also has meant that when our borders closed, Australia was vulnerable,” Albanese said in a press conference at the summit.

“We need to learn the lessons of the pandemic and build back stronger. One of the lessons is our migration mix needs to change. We can’t just have this over-reliance on temporary labour. And there are so many professions, whether it’s nursing, whether it’s engineers, whether it’s chefs, where we’ve had skills shortages for a long period of time. It makes no sense to bring people in, have them for a few years, then get a new cohort in to adapt to the Australian work environment.”

He earlier warned that the migration visa backlog was around 1 million applications.

Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil and Immigration Minister Andrew Giles have summed up the next steps on migration and visa processing after hearing from unions and employers about labour shortages and the need for skilled foreign workers.

O’Neil opened the discussion by announcing an increase in the permanent migration intake from 160,000 to 195,000 this year, just shy of the 200,000 figure widely discussed this week.

The previous record for permanent migration was 190,000 in 2012-13 and 2013-14. This is separate from any expansion of temporary or student visa programs.

The government will allocate an additional 4700 places for healthcare workers, 6100 places for the skills needed to build infrastructure and 6800 places for technology sector workers.

Another 5000 additional places will be allocated for businesses to sponsor employees on permanent visas, reflecting statements by Albanese this week about shifting the focus from temporary to permanent migration and future citizenship.

The federal government is also committing $36.1 million to clear the visa application backlog.

Giles said the country’s visa processing system “rests heavily on the shoulders of hundreds of people”.

“There were almost a million visas waiting for this government after the election. Today, that number is 900,000,” he said.

“Since I became a minister, I’ve heard hundreds of stories of people waiting for their application to be processed ... not knowing when they would see each other, businesses are unable to plan an investment decision because they don’t know when their applications will be final.”

Giles said the new money would be spent on visa processing, increasing staff capacity by 500 over the next nine months to clear the backlog.

“This will help deliver the permanent migration program that my friend Minister O’Neil announced,” he said. “We want, indeed we need people to choose Australia, and our processes and our policies must work together to support that choice.”

But the government is also managing a series of disputes over other issues at the summit including warnings from employers about workplace changes, calls for a new mining tax and demands for more spending on childcare and paid parental leave.

Treasurer Jim Chalmers said it would be up to Workplace Relations Minister Tony Burke to negotiate the key issue of multi-employer enterprise bargaining and the concern from some employers that the changes to the Fair Work Act would allow unions to go on strike across entire industries.

“We’re not trying to make it easier for there to be conflict in the industrial relations system, we want to make it easier for there to be agreement,” he said when asked on ABC Radio National if he would rule out changes to the law to allow those strikes.

“When it comes to multi-employer bargaining and simplifying other aspects of the bargaining system, I think it gives us a chance to get wages growing in a way that seeks more agreement, more effective agreements, which work for everyone rather than either the existing system, which isn’t getting wages growing again, or some of the alternatives.”

While Melbourne University professor and former government adviser Ross Garnaut called for the restoration of a mining tax in a speech to the summit on Thursday night, the government moved quickly to close that down.

“No, that’s not on the agenda,” Albanese told the Nine Network.

Chalmers said: “We don’t have a policy for a mining tax.”

But the government is facing growing calls for more spending on childcare and paid parental leave as the jobs summit discusses the need to encourage more women into the workforce.

Chalmers said the October 25 budget would implement Labor’s election promise to spend another $5 billion on childcare with more generous subsidies from July next year, but he fended off calls to bring the changes forward to January.

On calls for federal funding for 26 weeks of paid parental leave, Chalmers argued the government could not afford to make the change even though it had merit.

“I would love to do it, if I can find a way to pay for it. This is one of the things that I would love to be able to do,” he said.

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