A Newcastle businessman who is pursuing the skilled migrant worker scheme says there's no easy fix to ongoing problems with widespread staffing shortages.
The federal government announced at its Jobs And Skills Summit on Friday it would lift the permanent migration program cap by 35,000 to 195,000 to help fill workforce vacancies.
Michael Pultar, managing director of Frost Group, said he'd had difficulties sourcing workers from the program for a variety of reasons. He looked into the scheme earlier this year after exhausting other avenues to find sheet metal fabricators.
"We've been on a labour conquest for the last 12 to 18 months, no different to any other trade or business around Australia," Mr Pultar said.
"We were losing a lot of labour to mining or mining-related industries. We advertise, we try to recruit. We pay very good money for our industry but we can't seem to attract people and that goes all the way down the line to apprentices."
The business owner tried to find someone locally to help them access the skilled migrant program, but couldn't find the right support, so eventually connected with Australian Skilled Migration in Melbourne.
However that process hasn't been simple.
"They haven't gotten enough resources in their own people to service the inquiry rate or be able to find these skilled persons from overseas," Mr Pultar said.
"They're saying they're struggling to find the people in those regions where they would normally recruit these people from."
The wait time is another issue. The federal government also announced it would invest $36.1 million into clearing the backlog of 900,000 visas waiting to be processed.
"A lot of those would be skilled migration applications," Mr Pultar said. "They've announced $36 million but even though the money is there, there's no people to facilitate the programs.
"They keep talking about how much money they can throw at it but nothing ever happens."
Mr Pultar said he was told the process could take nine to 12 months, most of which would be the waiting time for the visa to be assessed.
Having seen similar staffing issues in Europe and the US, Mr Pultar said he didn't know what the answer was.
"It's worldwide," he said. "We've had the same problems with our partners in Italy, in Spain, in Holland, the US. No one can tell us where all the labour has disappeared through these COVID periods.
"It's really tough. There's more to it with training and TAFE. They also announced a whole bunch of money for more positions at TAFE but we can't even attract people to the trade.
"Before the intake this year, TAFE rang me and said 'are you taking your normal two apprentices... because if you're not taking your two apprentices we're going to shut the class down because we just don't have enough kids to facilitate the class'.
"There's plenty of things going on that just compound the whole equation. It's not an easy fix."
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