For the first time since World War II, Australia will experience negative net migration growth. The federal government has announced changes in its immigration program that focus on attracting highly skilled migrants to help Australia’s economy recover from the COVID-19 epidemic.
Sally-Anne Williams is the director of Cicada Innovations, a technology entrepreneurship center in Sydney. She says attracting the best overseas people to Australia has been a challenge for the industry.
“Of course, people like fresh graduates or students still studying in their field, but you also need people who have some real-world experience. When you bring your product or service to market, you don’t just need to conduct scientific research, you don’t just need those skills, you also need to understand how to take a product from the lab to the marketplace and put it into practice. “
When international borders are reopened, these companies will be competing for a large pool of high-tech talent.
Australia’s population is growing at its slowest rate in more than a century. The federal government has revealed a major change in the immigration program.
The federal government plans to bring in the world’s “best and brightest,” and they have established a new task force to identify highly skilled people and high value businesses, initially targeting manufacturing, financial services, and health care.
The authorities have also restructured the skilled immigrant program, tripling the allocation of 15,000 places in the Global Talent Independence Program and nearly doubling the number of places in the Immigrant Investor Program for Innovative Enterprises to 13,500.
Acting Immigration Minister Alan Tudge said, “We know that talented people with extraordinary skills are coming here to start businesses, become entrepreneurs, become top scientists, and create jobs for others.
However, this has been followed by a sharp decline in other work visa slots, with the number of employer-sponsored work visa slots down by more than a quarter and the quota for independent skilled immigrants down by two-thirds.
Divya Sarine, director of the Canberra Early Childhood Education Centre, says she fears her field will suffer.
“When immigrants come to Australia they bring their own culture with them and it’s good for Australian children to learn about the world, about people’s lives in other places, about what they talk about. It’s like passing on the knowledge that we care about to our children as we learn every day.”
Early childhood education is just one of many industries that rely on overseas migration, with more than a third of the field’s employees born overseas.
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