Australian business owners are calling for urgent help to address extreme worker shortages including easier visa pathways to permanent residency.
As office workers steadily return to Sydney's CBD, Renee Baltov's barbershop in Martin Place is finally seeing a boom in customers.But like many small business owners around Australia, Ms Baltov is faced with ongoing staff shortages and fears her dreams of expansion — she has a second shop nearby and is considering opening a third — may have to be put on hold.
New figures from the Department of Home Affairs showed just 23,000 Temporary Skill Shortage visa holders have arrived in Australia over the past five months. There are more than 24,000 people who hold visas in that category but remain offshore. "Employers are finding it very hard to run their businesses and to keep up without the labour and the skills that they need."Mr Willox is backing calls for a simpler and speedier skilled visa application process to help ease worker shortages."We've got to think of migration and training of locals together, but migration is a quicker fix and it does have spillover benefits for the economy as a whole.
"What's going to happen is small businesses will contract, they'll restrict their hours and they'll restrict the number of products and services they offer." "I think there is a bit of a bad rap with Australia at the moment in cohorts of people who are looking at coming on temporary visas, such as the working holiday visas but especially the student visas," he says.