The ABC’s business editor, Ian Verrender, has written a terrific article debunking the business lobby’s incessant claim that Australia is experiencing skills shortages and needs to import migrant workers.
According to Verrender:
- The shortage claim lacks empirical evidence: “If it really is the case that skilled labour is in such short supply, why aren’t wages being bid into the stratosphere by desperate employers? In fact, the opposite is true”.
- How could Australia’s ‘world class’ tertiary education system fail so badly to equip people with skills, yet “legions of foreign students fight to get a place in our universities and colleges and pay through the nose for the privilege”.
- In 2002, the business lobby told a Howard Government inquiry that Australia was experiencing skills shortages and required skilled migrants. Twenty years later, the argument is exactly the same. How can this be after decades of strong immigration?
- In any event, “there’s an easy fix to skills shortages — pay higher wages”. But “instead, the push has been on to import large numbers of extra workers”. Why? Because businesses want to “depress the price of labour” and grow the population to create “a bigger economy and a larger potential market which makes it easier for businesses to make more money without any need for innovation”.
Verrender also reproduces the below chart from the RBA showing how the skills shortage “crisis” was largely a work of fiction:
Australia hasn’t experienced ‘skills shortages’ for a decade.
Verrender then notes that many skilled migrants cannot get jobs in their chosen field and end up being unemployed or underemployed. He also observes that Australia’s per capita GDP growth has been appalling, experiencing multiple per capita recessions.
Verrender concludes his report with the following telling observation:
The Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development — now led by former finance minister Matthias Cormann — last week delivered its latest assessment of our progress…
Per capita GDP was 9 per cent lower than the OECD’s best performers and our productivity was 15 per cent below the star performers.
Our problem isn’t so much a skills shortage as a policy ruse.
We’ve bodgied up the numbers to make it appear we are world leaders when it comes to economic growth. But in the process, we’ve squeezed wages, living standards and productivity.
Truer words have only appeared before on MB, which has provided similar analysis over many years.
No matter how the Australian economy has tracked, or how many migrants have arrived, the business lobby has always cried ‘shortage’ and demanded more cheap migrant workers.
It’s time our politicians stopped listening to these parasites and instead allowed the labour ‘market’ to distribute workers to areas of highest return (as measured by wages).
