Skilled staff on top of budget wish list

In the lead up to the Albanese Government’s second federal budget, due to be handed down on May 9, the AHA National office has been working on a comprehensive prebudget submission.

There are many competing priorities when it comes to carving up the federal coffers, particularly with rising inflation squeezing both households and the businesses they rely on.

We are realistic about the economic realities of balancing a budget, and our submission is a wish list of sorts.

But we cannot forget that hospitality was the second hardest hit sector during the pandemic.

We are still very much in recovery mode and continue to face huge challenges caused by global factors outside our control.

Staffing remains the number one issue nationwide.

The global pandemic not only distracted governments and businesses from tackling our staffing issues, it also created a unique set of conditions that have made it worsen ten-fold.

Our submission includes measures to increase the participation and skills of

Australian workers as well as using migration to fill shortages.

For home grown workers we would like to increase the capacity of women to return to the workforce by ensuring affordable and available childcare and increase the level of mature aged employment income for the age pension.

We would like to see new regional mature aged “placebased” approaches and initiate an awareness campaign amongst the mature aged highlighting the transportability of their ‘soft skills’ to sectors such as hospitality and accommodation.

We would also like to see incentives to encourage businesses to employ mature aged apprentices.

We need to implement workplace internships for the most disadvantaged, increase the mobility of workforce and the mobility of younger Australians by expanding ‘gap year’ schemes. One of the greatest handbrakes on worker mobility is housing availability, particularly rentals and cost.

You can’t get workers to go to Cairns or Byron Bay or Broome if there is nowhere to live in the area.

An easily fixable way to boost the number of skilled overseas workers is to continue putting resources into reducing the huge backlog of visa applications.

We would also like to see the permanent skilled migration cap increased to 210,000 and the distribution between skilled and family migrants be restored.

We need to make sure Australia is competitive on pricing and ease of application for visas, especially compared to the countries we are in competition with, like Canada, New Zealand, and United Kingdom.

We would like to see skilled migrants in key occupations given a maximum stay of four years, with the option to renew for an additional four, and most importantly a pathway to permanent residency.

These crucial occupations include café and restaurant manager, hotel or motel manager, accommodation and hospitality manager, cook, pastry cook, and hotel service manager.

International students working in hospitality should also be permitted to continue to work up to 30 hours per week until June 30, 2024.

We recommend a review of ANZCO (Australian and New Zealand Standard Classification of Occupations) as soon as possible to ensure the 2023 to 2024 migration program and skills lists are responsive to the needs of the labour market, and ongoing funding is provided to allow for regular reviews of ANZSCO.

The Skilling Australians Fund levy should be halved to $600 per year for small business and $900 for large business for each sponsored temporary migrant, and the levy should be refunded in all cases where a skilled migration application is not successful.

The Temporary Skilled Migration Income Threshold (TSMIT) currently $53,900 needs to be increased at a level that will not inadvertently exclude occupations in the accommodation and hospitality industry which might otherwise be eligible for skilled migration. This will ensure hospitality roles in cooking and supervisory roles can be sponsored.

It would be beneficial to increase the maximum validity of the 485 visa Graduate Work Stream from 18 months to four years and we would also like to see the temporary Hotel and Accommodation industry labour agreement become permanent.

We would also like to see sponsored visa applications expedited for reputable industry organisations with high levels of industrial compliance among their membership.