Last night's budget reinforces my argument that we have to get more workers from overseas and because of that the government needs to start thinking outside the square as to how this might be achieved expeditiously. The tremendous increase in the work force needed to service the aged care cohort is just one example. Immunizing people before they arrive would be a much more cost effective strategy than keeping them locked up in quarantine after they arrive. By then all the residents should also be immunized so that the spread of the virus in those facilities would be averted.
David

I usually agree with VK, but Hasbeen is right here. Local workers are willing to do agricultural work, but farmers refuse to hire them, because they are citizens or legal permanent residents and have rights, so they are harder to exploit.

http://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2020/11/the-great-farm-labour-shortage-lie/

(Of course, part of the problem is not just greed, but that the farmers themselves are exploited by the supermarket duopoly.) There is a similar situation in the US, where farmers prefer to hire illegal immigrants, even though there are unlimited agricultural guest worker visas. The guest workers have rights and are harder to exploit.

Before the Immigration Act of 1965 in the US, immigration was low, and the average immigrant was better educated and better paid than the average American, yet somehow crops were picked, hotel rooms were cleaned, houses were built, lawns were mowed, dishes were washed, and nursing homes were staffed.

Aged care would not be a problem here either, if the government would do something about the profiteering, allowing decent wages and working conditions.

The genuine shortage of skilled workers has a lot to do with the gutting of vocational education by the government and the unwillingness of employers to train. We might need to import some skilled workers under strictly temporary conditions while these problems are fixed.

There are now vaccines available, with many nations already well into vaccination programs, precluding tight lockdowns and/or closing national borders (provided protocols exist).

While the Australian government seems hesitant and/or constrained on a vaccination program, it's not going to be a good look when many other nations have already vaccinated most of their population (Many in EU, by July), and crossing borders....

Staying the 'Hermit kingdom' too long, under the guise of reducing 'political risk' will have socioeconomic (and later electoral) impacts.

For example, budget receipts through lower and/or negative NOM or temporary churn over, regions especially unable to attract backpackers for seasonal harvest workers, far less significant flow on from international students; not just university but more in the English college sector which has far higher turnover of short term visitors vs. university and TAFE.

For those claiming temporary churn over of students with restricted work rights, crimps or precludes pay rises for Australians, maybe better to promote wage rises and super contribution guarantee increases under awards (versus blaming 'immigrants', an old trope)?

PS Since when has MacroBusiness been a credible source?

Here is another source for you on farmers wanting their cheap, exploitable foreign labour:

http://thenewdaily.com.au/news/national/2020/11/08/australians-farm-work-job/

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) that you like to quote lost a defamation lawsuit against them by Maajid Nawaz and had to pay him $3.375 million and issue him a "groveling apology". They make a habit of smearing political opponents' organisations as hate groups on very tenuous criteria. ("I danced with a man who danced with a girl who danced with the Prince of Wales.") This time it caught up with them. So far as I know, no one has ever sued Macrobusiness despite some very trenchant criticism.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-southern-poverty-law-center-has-lost-all-credibility/2018/06/21/22ab7d60-756d-11e8-9780-b1dd6a09b549_story.html

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/06/28/morris-dees-splc-trump-southern-poverty-law-center-215312e7e8-11e1-8487-64e4b2a79ba8_story.html?utm_term=.95e618b7058f

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2018/09/10/southern-poverty-law-center-essentially-a-fraud/

No one that I know is blaming migrants. We blame the politicians who only care about themselves and their donors, and the greedsters who exploit the migrants.

Maajid Nawaz channeling John Tanton and the same eco-system as SPA, he got away with embarrassing SPLC (after being included in an anti Islam extremist list*); they must be doing something right when the Republican Convention want SPLC shut down?

Nawaz is chummy with alt/far right types with antipathy towards Islam e.g. Breitbart, Steve Bannon et al., Nigel Farage, Toby Young of now closed Quilliam (co founded by Nawaz), etc.

On Quilliam from the Mid East Eye:

'Critics of the organisation, however, regularly accused it of authoritarianism as well as targeting Muslim groups across the UK and tarring them with the "extremist" label with little evidence.

A list drawn up by the group in 2010 for a UK Home Office counter-terrorism chief, which accused numerous peaceful Muslim organisations of sharing the ideology of militant groups, was branded "McCarthyite"....

...Writing about Nawaz in 2018, columnist Nesrine Malik said that while she thought the SPLC classification had gone too far, she nevertheless believed he fed into right-wing narratives about minorities and Muslims*.

"It is hard to shake the impression that since Maajid Nawaz and [anti-Islam campaigner] Ayaan Hirsi Ali now see everything in relation to the traitorous left, they have been recruited to the right’s agenda - which is increasingly hostile to Muslims, immigrants, and brown people generally," Malik wrote in the New York Review of Books.'

https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/uk-quilliam-foundation-controversial-counter-extremist-closes

We can cut to the chase, that eco-fascist Christchurch Mosque shooter was clearly influenced by the same, and acted out the same ideas of John Tanton:

'Long before this violence, researchers warned of “the greening of hate”. From Tanton’s anti-immigration nonprofit network to some of today’s avowed environmentalists, across the political spectrum, overpopulation and immigration in particular has been blamed for environmental collapse for over 50 years.'

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/aug/15/anti

What is the end game for you guys (as fertility then population drops) and brown people outnumber 'white' people? I presume you are member of SPA, what is their policy on environment (that does not mean restrictions on immigrants) and why the anonymous moniker?

Forgot to add the feedback from SPA types years ago about the focus of SPLC, i.e. John Tanton, TSCP The Social Contract Press and his anti-immigrant organisations such Numbers USA, FAIR and CIS, which later advised the Trump administration.

Malcolm King wrote in OLO 'Stable Population Party 'green-washing' racism':

'troubling is William Bourke's (President of SPA) comment on The Conversation on 29 May, that he had never heard of the Social Contract Press, of John Tanton (a former employer of Becks) or any foreign anti-population/anti-immigration group.

"I have never heard of the USA groups/people you mention, let alone have "links" with them. In fact the ASPP has no links to ANY group anywhere, including in Australia - we are completely independent, at my insistence, from day one," said Bourke.

But he'd only met Beck a few months prior. Why did he deny it? Exactly what is the relationship of the SPP with the anti-immigration movement in America? I appreciated the up-front honesty of Canberra SPP Senate candidate and poet Mark O'Connor,who was an associate of John Tanton's, when he commented on one of my articles on OLO:

"John Tanton is a bit right wing but neither a racist nor eugenicist. He stayed with his wife and daughter in my (left wing) house for several days some years ago and, indeed, I went to Washington in 1991 at his expense to work in the FAIR office… I attended the writing workshops sponsored by the Social Contract in 2010 and 2011 in Washington and while they were a bit right wing for me (anti-Obama and pro-Republican), they nevertheless had a lot to offer."

https://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=15382&page=0

Like another SPA person former Labor MP Kelvin Thomson did not get the memo either, averting his gaze? He participated many years ago in a US event by 'Progressive for Immigration Reform'; maybe someone needs to translate for him the Orwellian title when it really means 'white nationalists for immigration restrictions'....