Immigration needs reform, not a summit

In immigration matters, in processing visas of so many elaborate and confusing types, Home Affairs is understaffed and overwhelmed, writes Jack the Insider.

The Jobs and Skills Summit wrapped up last Friday with the unions getting a bit of what they want if it happens and employers getting a bit of what they want when it happens. This is what amounts to consensus in the early days of the Albanese government.

The nation’s skills and labour crises run deeper than the pageantry of a summit can fix.

Talk to immigration lawyers and you’ll soon discover that the hoops migrants must clamber through are too small, the bureaucratic hurdles too high, the processes too slow.

There is a skills shortage not just in Australia driven by education and training policy neglect – the death of the old technical schools being one mighty example, but a worldwide skills shortage with nations like the UK, the US, Canada and New Zealand vying for a larger slice of a smaller pie. We are merely in the mix.

And while we’ve got the ‘We’re Hiring’ sign out now, Australia has got its immigration messaging all wrong. The first of these missteps occurred when Immigration fell under the aegis of Border Patrol replete with black-shirted former customs officers bearing medals on their chests straight outta Pyongyang. This ridiculous cosplay stands as a beacon of government ineptitude, effectively a militarisation of immigration.

And then when the pandemic came, migrants weren’t allowed to come to Australia at all for much of the last two years with the nation continent replete with metaphorical razor ribbon and skulls and crossbones on its borders.

Imagine you’re a skilled migrant or a student seeking tertiary education with its associated costs, scanning the globe for a place and having to walk through the labyrinth that is the Department of Home Affairs.

Immigration lawyers both here and overseas complain that student visas with the right to work in the country are taking months to process while we have a labour shortage in retail and hospitality.

It is unsurprising that migrants with sought after skills or students pumping the economy and filling labour shortages are choosing to settle in other parts of the world.

The jobs summit wasn’t needed to overhaul immigration, writes Jack the Insider. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Gary Ramage

This is part of the media release sent out by the PMO in the wake of the Skills and Job Summit, listing its ‘achievements’.

1. An additional $1 billion in joint federal-state funding for fee-free TAFE in 2023 and accelerated delivery of 465,000 fee-free TAFE places;

2. A one-off income credit so that age pensioners who want to work can earn an additional $4000 over this financial year without losing any of their pension;

3. More flexibly utilising $575 million in the National Housing Infrastructure Facility to invest in social and affordable housing, and attract financing from superannuation funds and other sources of private capital;

4. Modernising Australia’s workplace relations laws, including to make bargaining accessible for all workers and businesses;

5. Amending the Fair Work Act to strengthen access to flexible working arrangements, make unpaid parental leave more flexible and strengthen protection for workers against discrimination and harassment;

6. Improving access to jobs and training pathways for women, First Nations people, regional Australians and culturally and linguistically diverse people, including equity targets for training places, 1000 digital apprenticeships in the Australian Public Service, and other measures to reduce barriers to employment;

7. An increase in the permanent Migration Program ceiling to 195,000 in 2022-23 to help ease widespread, critical workforce shortages; and

8. Extending visas and relaxing work restrictions on international students to strengthen the pipeline of skilled labour, and providing additional funding to resolve the visa backlog.

The first thing to note here is the turgid bureaucratic language. We have been spared the management drivel about ambitious KPIs but that is because often what is indicated as an outcome is either aspirational or not measurable. What might conceivably be described as an outcome, lands in the possible.

While sensible, Item One is phrased in a haze of government speak: 465,000 fee-free TAFE places. Wow. That’s a lot. But when? Not in 2023 if you look at it closely and any rise in 2023 is predicated on yet to be established agreements over state and federal funding.

Item Two is essentially coalition policy with some meat on the bones. What it proposes (rather than delivers) is that people on the OAP may now work around three-and-a-half paid hours more per week. It is tinkering at the edges at best.

Home Affairs Department Secretary Mike Pezzullo. Picture: AAP

Item Four relates to the hot industrial relations topic of multi-employer enterprise bargaining which will require legislation in the form of amendments to the Fair Work Act that are yet to be drafted let alone seen. It is fair to suggest that when the legislation is drafted and consultation sought, employers and unions are unlikely to be singing from the same song sheet.

But when we get to Items Seven and Eight, we see a lift in the permanent migration program by just 20,000 to 195,000, a figure closer to immigration figures in the Howard era. It is an ambition in need of fruition and relies heavily on the Department of Home Affairs increasing its capacity to manage that increase in a timely fashion, in the period of what’s left in the current financial year.

The babble about relaxing the restrictions on international students to work in Australia and “strengthening the pipeline” of skilled labour – a piece of government banality if ever there was one, ends with the almost whispered, “providing additional funding to resolve the backlog”.

This finally is an acknowledgment of the problems within the Home Affairs Department, a bureaucracy so big and unwieldy it has almost forgotten what its primary purpose is. In immigration matters, in processing visas of so many elaborate and confusing types, it is understaffed and overwhelmed.

In other words, what needs to be fixed in the short term in this country is largely fixable by the Albanese government without the need for summitry.

Look, it was nice that everyone could sit around the table and talk. Consultation feeds conciliation and everyone loves a circus. But the Albanese government didn’t need a summit to appreciate that immigration policy and bureaucracy needs to be reformed from the top down. It simply has to act.