POLL: Catch-up migration - good or bad?

I speculated that there might be a catch-up migration at the last Sydney virtual meetup.

Migration rethink: Hike on the cards for post-pandemic recovery

Population growth through migration has driven Australia’s economic growth for decades. Due to COVID, Australia had negative population growth last financial year!

Big business and property developers are lobbying government as we speak.

 

Topical opinion - migration policy has focused on skilled workers and students, which has skewed migration locations towards Melbourne and Sydney. Its not the volume that is the issue, its the policy itself.

Not sure what things are like on the ground in Sydney, but you can't drive 5km in Melbourne without encountering roadworks. I would re-phrase the "can't cope" to say that Sydney and Melbourne wouldn't cope with double the migration levels they have seen in the last 5 years, but Australia as a whole - there's facilities that cater for the other 60% of the population, and 99.9% of the land mass that's virtually untapped.

There is definitely scope to increase migration, but it needs to target a wider range of migrants and incentivise them to live in smaller towns like Traralgon, Bunbury, Townsville, etc.

 

Should be investing into our own residents first and training them up in the skills we need now and into the future, but that is of course too hard.

We haven't really addressed the real problem. We should be asking the more important question "just why don't we have the right skills and people here?"

More seems to be a failure of Government and our education system to move the country forward. Easier just to admit we've failed and import it from overseas.

 

I believe this was starting to happen. Pre covid I had come across a couple of people in the NT and Tas who claimed to be there for a period of time as a pathway to permanent residency. Predictably they were counting the days to get back to Sydney (and especially Melbourne) as for whatever reason that was what thier idea of what Australia is.

Im skeptical of the skilled migrant category in its current form however. It seems every other Uber I've caught is being driven by a high skilled individual who simply cannot get work in thier speciality.
The cynic in me believes that industry commonly uses the skilled migrant pool as a way to temper local salaries or avoid the need to invest in upskilling thier existing staff.

 

Due to the normalization of remote work and lifestyle and affordability a much greater proportion of new migrants will settle in the regions compared to the previous 10 years.

So moving forward...Australia will become more decentralized.

 

Terrible.

Public health system is already a joke

 

Nobody talks about the real reason we desperately need migration on a regular basis to keep operating as a nation.

The real reason is our terrible education system .. it continues to fail to produce enough new doctors, engineers, IT experts, inventors and investors which means we have to rely on other countries' education systems to fulfil our needs.

Fix the education system and you won't have an ongoing shortage of critical human resources requiring ongoing immigration streams.

 

Stop migration and it will come crashing down without new doctors and nurses. Around 56% of GPs serving in Australia are foreign trained migrants and this number is increasing every year as our education system is getting worse and worse.

 

It's obvious by this poll some people on this site aren't bona fide investors.

 

As a skilled migrant myself, I'm all for higher skilled migration to Australia.
I think many are not aware what this stream means and how Australia benefits from it.

When we let skilled people to come to Australia we're getting a "ready to work / ready to pay taxes / ready to produce" worker who've been raised and educated on some other country expanse.
It's a "spend nothing, get heaps" type of investment Australia is doing.

Don't get me wrong, for the migrants themselves, they are getting to live in what many consider (me included) as one of the best countries in the world (yes, including, and maybe as a result, of the tough stance on COVID and "freedom")

Ummm.... So you don't want more doctors / nurses / therapists / researchers etc (all part of the skilled migration stream)?

I bag a differ.
Australia's education system is not worse then most.
Are there better? Yeah.
Many? Not in a long stretch of imagination.

Too many parents, students and university students in this generation think it's the job of the "education" system to make them successful.

Truth is - it's not.
Being successful is mainly being self motivated to succeed.
Hence the reason why it's well shown that private school graduate are more likely to drop from Uni then public school graduates. They are so used to be spoon fed, the transition to "no one cares, you need to work" university mentality kills them.

 

I'm not sure you know what it means to skilled migrate to Australia. I can tell you - it's not walk in the park.
Both my wife and myself are highly educated from a world class universities overseas, with English as second language we studied since 4th grade, with notable experience in out top-ranked professions for PR visa and it took us a full year to fulfil the requirements. 15 years ago.
Things are even harder now.

I find it very unlikely that "every other Uber driver" is a skill migrant that cannot find a job.
I have quite a few skilled migrants I know and none had a huge issue finding a job when they moved.

 

Or pay increased taxes in order to fund the public health system? Just a thought.

 

You cannot fund more people if you don't have them...

 

My point was it's both.

In 2017–18:

• There were 693 public hospitals and 657 private hospitals in Australia.
• The Australian Government provided 41% of public hospital funding and 24% of private hospital funding.
• Recurrent expenditure on public hospitals was $71 billion, with about 62% of this spent on salaries, wages and superannuation.

Hospital resources 2017–18: Australian hospital statistics, Funding and recurrent expenditure - Australian Institute of Health and Welfare

 

As a matter of fact, we are really poor in science and math and getting worse year on year.

"A global study of more than half a million 15-year-olds has found Australian students lag 3.5 years behind their Chinese counterparts in maths — and their performance in all three major subjects is in long-term decline." Source: Australian students slip in global maths, reading and science rankings




Now you would think Australia needs to do something urgently to improve our standing in 'science and math'.

NSW Education just did the complete opposite this year by changing the format of year 7 selective school test by reducing math portion to just 20% of the total test from 1/3rd previously.
Selection process

 

I'm not an expert, but I've heard that private hospitals are reducing the load on the public system.
It allows those with the means to have quicker and nicer treatment within the private system, removing themselves from the public waiting lists.

It might not be "fair", but life's is not fair and at the end of the day - it's the least of two evils.

 

While it is diverging from the main subject matter, it can be argued that is not the case. If it were then ambulance ramping which increased well before Covid would not occur. Nor would load shedding - moving patients to other public hospitals due to capacity issues.

 

No catch up needed. Restrict immigration to the bare minimum. Property prices will go up. Wages will go up.

Big business want catch up because they want cheap labour. For too long the working class have suffered because most ( but not all) employers are greedy and don’t want wages to go up.

A lot of employers also treat their employees like garbage and they don’t even classify their workers as employees. Thus the worker gets ripped off even more.

This unique period in history has given the ordinary worker the opportunity to strike back!

 

LOL.
Love those articles.
And then they compare Australia to China. Or South Korea. Or Japan. Or Singapore.

I don't know about you, but I have friends in all those places. With kids similar to my kids (primary and high schools) - I wouldn't want my kids to study in those systems even if their school would have taught to throw stones into the water (I dunno.... I was looking for some very unproductive activity).

I have family and friends spend across the whole globe, both in APAC and in Europe and they all have kids in similar ages.
Hearing how their kids study make me sick.
At least 2 hours homework every day, that they have to start at about 7pm or 8pm due to extra activities, exams almost every day, with public grades for everyone to see and compare including constant updates in the parents portals, constant competition and grading of students into classes and groups based on their achievements.

Nah.... Not my cup of tea.
I prefer my kids (very average) public school way: no homework at all, barely any exams, lots of sport in-school activities.
They come home, mostly after they finished their after school sports that they chose to participant in, spending some time on their brainless social media chats with friends, spending some time with us (if we're lucky) and the next morning they wake up fresh and happy to go to school.
They love going to school. And that's the most important thing.

 

With a property investor's hat on, I would definitely like to see immigration higher. It is the main reason I invested in residential property in a capital city - limited supply and ever increasing demand (i.e. people).

I suspect it's the easiest lever to pull for the Government to increase GDP. Out of the three Ps (productivity, population and participation rate), population growth requires the least work.

Also it has been highlighted in the 2015 Intergenerational Report that lower immigration would lead to:

• slower economic growth
• an ageing population and
• lower participation rates and adverse consequences on the tax take

I don't think any Government in their right mind would pursue a low immigration strategy based on the above.

IMO the only thing that will stop high immigration is a huge backlash from voters. However, that would be a short-sighted approach as it is a net positive for Australia's long term prosperity to import skilled, working age migrants.