Labor gearing for mobile internationalisation of labour

May 17, 2008

"... the greatest modernisation of the architecture of the Australian economy ever contemplated in our peacetime history."

Rudd and Swan have launched a nation-building revolution invoking old but enduring Labor mythologies... It begins with the effort to expand and recast migration. In the 2008-09 budget, the total intake for immigration and temporary people movement is near 300,000, and this leap is just the start.

... Immigration Minister Chris Evans says Australia needs "a great national debate over the next few years" about the need to import not just skilled but semi-skilled and unskilled workers. "The system's creaking at the moment because it is unresponsive to new demands and new realities," he says.

... He wants a "serious overhaul" of the system. It is urgent because migration "is based on a model that is out of date", still anchored in the 1950s and '60s and not geared to the mobile internationalisation of labour in the 21st century.

"The demands of business are hitting us in the face," Evans says. His experiences as a West Australian aware of acute shortages and capacity constraints drives this urgency...

"The debate about temporary migration, quite frankly, is over." ...

The program's transformation will be a challenge for economic and social policy for trade unions, a test of Australia's racial and cultural maturity, and the next step in gearing the nation's labour market to global realities. It becomes a vital instrument in managing the resources boom.

In their first budget, Rudd and Swan did something they never promised: the biggest annual increase in migrants since the inception of the scheme...

Australian labour shortages are here to stay. They are driven by economics and demography. With the retirement of the baby boomers, limits to female workforce participation and the permanence of the China-India resources boom, immigration is returning to centre stage in dramatic fashion.

Evans stresses the dynamic of contemporary people movement. "Last year upwards of 500,000 people came into this country with working rights: holiday-makers, students and so on," he says. A further trend is onshore migration, whereby students and 457 visa holders convert to become migrants...

At the same time, habits of native-born Australians are changing. "We can't get Australians to work in abattoirs in rural Queensland," Evans says. "We've got Brazilian meat workers here who want to convert to migration, and their employers want this, too." ...

These reformist plans will stimulate the race debate.

"There's always, frankly, the race issue," he says. "One of the challenges is that source countries are changing. We still get 25 per cent of the program from Britain but we are seeing an increase from India, China, the Philippines and South America off a small base." He agrees it will be tricky to persuade the unions and the public to accept unskilled labour. But this is a debate Australia cannot avoid.

There goes the community. There goes the social cohesion. There goes relaxed and comfortable. Free trade isn't so free anymore. Society is an expendable instrument in managing the resources boom. Hands up who wants a resource boom now?