Our cafes are open but are you being served?

In industries such as the hospitality sector, ­almost 100,000 jobs were lost, ­according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Picture: NCA NewsWire/David Geraghty

Every Australian would be thankful for the way our various state and federal governments have successfully protected us from the worst of the COVID pandemic.

Australia’s geographic isolation worked in our favour as we sought to distance ourselves from the worst of the outbreaks seen in places such as Europe and the US.

However, this isolation risks alienating our economy as the world recovers and as vaccination programs give way to a return to international travel.

Australia has always relied on immigration to fuel our economic growth. World wars, the gold rush and civil wars have brought waves of immigrants who have helped propel the economy. COVID-19 should be seen as the newest workforce migration opportunity for our governments. International tourism and travel bubbles are great, but our nation’s recovery will not be built on the goodwill and deep pockets of tourists, but of workers willing to play a small part in our nation’s economic recovery.

In many ways, COVID is a unique economic challenge. We saw hundreds of thousands of ­student, working holiday and skilled visa holders leave — nearly 200,000 fewer bodies in Australia under these three categories in February this year compared with pre-pandemic levels.

In industries such as the hospitality sector, ­almost 100,000 jobs were lost, ­according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics. As the recovery begins, sectors such as these are suffering a structural problem: a critical labour shortage that, if left unresolved, will severely hamper our recovery efforts. This is a national problem.

Restaurants, cafes and caterers in CBDs such as Melbourne and Sydney are sharing the same issue as restaurants at Port Douglas, Hobart and the Margaret River. Next time you go out to dinner or grab a morning coffee, ask the business owner what their No 1 problem is. I guarantee you they will say “we just can’t get staff”.

The problem isn’t as simple as getting young Australians into these jobs, as important as this is. It is about accepting that short-term workers play a vital role in our labour market, especially in sectors such as hospitality. There are tens of thousands of jobs available right now on Seek.com.au in hospitality and tourism, the highest in decades, yet our unemployment rate is just 5.8 per cent.

This migrant workforce problem is twofold. Skilled migrants, who were not supported through government programs, left Australia to return to their home countries, leaving restaurants and cafes across the country having to reduce their opening hours or close due to an acute shortage of chefs and managers, and no method to replace these lost workers in the short term.

The second is the mass exodus of international students and working holiday-makers, again with no pathway or certainty about when they can return.

So how do we fix this structural problem? To paraphrase a famous quote from former Labor immigration minister Arthur Calwell, migrate or perish. This is why restaurants and catering companies are calling for a new short-term visa class to be created, the COVID Recovery Workforce Visa. This visa would allow entry to workers who agreed to work in sectors of our economy suffering from critical shortages for a short period provided they paid for visas, travel, a short quarantine stay, initial testing and — most important — were already vaccinated before coming to Australia.

Opening this vital pipeline would help plug these labour gaps and keep businesses open, and would signal to the world that Australia was not just a haven from COVID-19 but a haven for those, like generations before them, looking for new opportunities after a period of disaster.

Doing this will require bravery on the part of our state and federal governments. But it is a vital ­opportunity that must be grasped. A COVID migration workforce must be a central part of our path out of the pandemic. Failure to embrace this opportunity risks alienating our economy through the closure of businesses and will mean our recovery efforts fall short. Just ­because we are isolated, does not mean we can be isolationist in our recovery approach.

Wes Lambert is chief executive of the Restaurant & Catering Industry Association, which represents 48,000 members, most of them small businesses.