Australian Worker Shortage Feared

I’ve just relocated back to Australia, to Sydney, after six years in New York (hence the break in transmission since the last post). I’ve started a photo-blog for my non-Aus friends who haven’t seen much of Sydney. Given a choice, I would have preferred to stay in the U.S. due to all the wonderful, intelligent and creative friends I have first met there. However, the pathetic state of U.S. immigration laws are such that it actively worked against me keeping my money and skills in that country.

I’ve just relocated back to Australia, to Sydney, after six years in New York (hence the break in transmission since the last post). I’ve started a photo-blog for my non-Aus friends who haven’t seen much of Sydney. Given a choice, I would have preferred to stay in the U.S. due to all the wonderful, intelligent and creative friends I have first met there. However, the pathetic state of U.S. immigration laws are such that it actively worked against me keeping my money and skills in that country.

Returning to Australia immediately reveals just how skewed it’s own immigration laws are. Unemployment is roughly 3.5% and this is a proper statistic counting those actually unemployed, unlike the U.S. unemployment figure which only measures people for the first 13 months of their unemployment. Traditionally the U.S. and Australia have relied on and benefited massively from immigrants. However, the Howard government while recognising and fretting over the lack of workers, instead continues to engage in racist and ideologically slanted immigration quotas.

We have the bizarre scenario of the government fascisticly demanding women produce more children (since there is no cost of living allowance, the burden falls on the breadwinner, not directly on the government), and wanting to drive disabled people and single mothers back to work, while refusing to acknowledge the problem is wider spread than getting niche groups back into wage slavery, and immediate – not in 18 years time when some neo-baby boom may address the issue.

Given the context of the historic genocide and ethnic cleansing against Aboriginal people, the inability of successive governments to meet minimum refugee quotas obligated as a signatory to the U.N charter, the racist white Australia policy ensuring cultural stagnation and therefore a loss of intellectual capital, the solution to the problem of a shortfall of workers is blindingly simple.

Australia must meet and exceed it’s refugee intake and immediately halt the illegal detention of asylum seekers and instead release them into their respective communities – simply matching Canadian and European policies. It must simplify and diversify the standards to allow more permanent residents – we don’t only need more computer programmers and doctors, we need more builders, more machinists, more artists.

I am not advocating an H1B or L1 work visa situation as the U.S. used for Y2K and the dot com boom – that simply resulted in most of the capital leaving the U.S. at the end of those bubbles, and did not drive U.S. industry to invest in training. The Australian immigration policy is in and of itself sound, encouraging people to settle, rather than be imported for short term corporate gain. It is however, skewed to require sponsorship mostly decided by corporate interests, ignoring the greater productive benefits of cultural and political diversity.

There needs to be a cold hard examination of immigration policy outcomes: Australia is still overwhelmingly white. While much is made of the wide diversity of sources of immigration, what is not mentioned is that the real numbers of those coming from other than traditional immigration sources (England, New Zealand and to a lesser extent Mediterranean Europe and much less, selected Asian countries), is still very low.

In short, Australia needs an immigrant diversity program similar to the U.S. greencard lottery. It needs to allow a number of people, perhaps ten to fifteen thousand per year to enter the country based on their being from other than the over-represented migrant countries and meeting basic education (high school) and health standards. It needs to improve and provide accessible language training for English-as-Second-Language immigrants. In that program alone, more employment opportunities arise. Australia needs to reclaim it’s place as a land of real, meaningful, functional opportunity, not as one composed of arrogant and privileged xenophobes.