Australia is in a global war for talent after a decade of political drift, Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil says.
While it is easy for temporary migrants to come here, he says it is still too difficult for permanent and highly skilled migrants.
“The system is expensive, it’s bureaucratic, it takes forever to get anything done,” O’Neil said at the summit.
“There is no proper feedback between the migration and training systems, so areas with skills shortages go on the shortage list and never come out again.”
When it worked, O’Neil says the immigration system had been the “special sauce of our national story.”
“But over the last decade, our immigration program has been drifting continentally,” he said.
Immigration wasn’t the whole answer to Australia’s challenges, but it was part of it, O’Neil says.
“Australia’s immigration system is not meeting our needs. And I think we should change that. Because the next 30 years will be very different for Australia than the last 30.”
“And this change [is] moving away from a system that is almost entirely focused on how we keep people out to a system that recognizes that we are in a global war for talent.”