Yoga teachers make draft core skills visa list, but not tradies

Yoga instructors, martial artists and dog handlers have beaten some construction trades to a spot on the nation’s draft priority skills list for migrants, despite the dire need for workers to tackle the nation’s housing crisis.

As the government faces a shortfall of 90,000 construction workers to meet its target of 1.2 million new homes by the end of the decade, the latest list of occupations that can be fast-tracked into the country includes wellness professionals, while trades including plumbers, bricklayers and cabinetmakers remain under consideration.

Yoga instructors are on a draft priority skills list for migrants but many trades have been left off so far.Credit: Getty Images, Sam Mooy

Parliament is locked in a fierce argument over the role of migration in housing affordability, with a debate over who qualifies for the overseas skills list being fought at the same time as the government strives to drive down the total number of people arriving in Australia while increasing the supply of homes.

It follows a stoush between the government and the building sector in December when tradies were left off the streamlined, high-skilled professional visa category amid union calls to ensure Australian jobs were prioritised.

BuildSkills Australia, which was commissioned by Labor to help solve Australia’s housing workforce crisis, said in a submission on the core skills list that boosting the proportion of migrant construction workers would rebalance the effect arrivals had on housing demand.

“Does the world really need more yoga instructors at this point in time?” BuildSkills head of research Rob Sobyra said.

“I’m not diminishing the importance of that as an occupation, or the validity of it. But from the perspective of our economic priorities in this country, our social and economic priorities, it would seem to us that we should really be prioritising basically any skilled trade.”

The Albanese government’s Jobs and Skills Australia has released three draft lists for occupations relating to a new core-skills migration stream: those it is confident should be on or off the list, and those requiring more consultation.

The new agency has included yogis and martial artists on the roll call of occupations it is confident will make the list, which also includes electricians, carpenters and joiners, and civil engineers. But painters, roof tilers, stonemasons and other tradespeople needed to address the housing crisis have been targeted for consultation.

Skills and Training Minister Brendan O’Connor said Jobs and Skills Australia was an independent agency currently consulting on the core skills list across the entire labour market, “including for plumbing, bricklaying and cabinetmaking”.

“That advice will then be considered in the government’s decision,” he said.

“The Albanese government invested more than $90 million in the recent budget to train more Australian tradies in the housing and construction sector, and for the fast-tracking of skills assessments for thousands of overseas workers already in Australia.”

BuildSkills said in March that an extra 90,000 construction workers would be needed by July to keep the government’s home-building target on track.

By analysing the proportion of migrants who ended up in construction jobs over 10 years, BuildSkills estimates that construction occupations were 1.2 per cent of net overseas migration.

“Migration is supplying fewer workers to the construction trades than it is adding to the broader population,” its submission on the list, lodged last month, said.

“As a result, a larger share of the existing labour force must be diverted to the construction of the houses and other assets needed to support these new residents, exacerbating rather than ameliorating trade shortages.”

BuildSkills’ Sobyra said lifting the percentage to 1.5 would take the number of migrant construction workers from 2700 to 3500 and allow the intake to “break even” on contributing to housing supply rather than demand.

While BuildSkills was not advocating for a particular intake level, Sobyra said upping the proportion to 10 per cent would see 19,000 tradespeople contributing to supply.

According to Home Affairs figures, the government granted 10,540 visas to tradies in 2022-23, and is on track to surpass that this year, which would exceed 1.5 per cent of net overseas migration.

Sobyra said that by releasing a very specific list of occupations, Jobs and Skills Australia’s approach was too finely calibrated.

“We’re just saying, if it’s a building trade, let them in,” he said, adding people in the construction industry migrated between specific jobs.

Asked whether that meant yoga instructors should be out, and construction workers in, he replied, “yeah, pretty much as simple as that”.

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton used his budget reply speech last month to pledge a dramatic cut in permanent migration figures as a key lever to free up the supply of homes.

Opposition immigration spokesman Dan Tehan told this masthead nearly a million migrants had arrived in the past two years, referring to the 518,000 net overseas migration figure for 2022-23 and the forecast of 395,000 for this financial year. That number is forecast to reduce to 250,000 for 2024-25.

“A Coalition government will reduce permanent migration from 185,000 to 140,000 for two years, rising to 150,000 in year three and 160,000 in year four,” Tehan said.

“At the same time, we will ensure there are enough permanent and temporary skilled visas for those with building and construction skills to support our local tradies to build the homes we need.”

Master Builders Australia chief executive Denita Wawn called on the government to urgently put all building and construction trade occupations on the list.

“These are the very people we need to attract to build the homes we desperately need,” she said.

ACTU assistant secretary Liam O’Brien said consultation on the list was “an important step towards engineering out exploitation and rebalancing our migration system”.

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