The place is full of highly skilled in doing nothing useful for very handsome salaries & hundreds of thousands who do their mundane but important work like clockwork but they don't get recognised with awards & wages that are merely a fraction of the pay of the afore-mentioned salary earners.
Salaries need to come down so wages become more competitive. Remuneration must more closely reflect performance & merit.
Being tattooed & adorned with nose-rings like cattle & useful for nothing is not what our tax Dollars should be wasted on !

Paul1405

My experience of those days was that immigrants were more motivated and tended to work harder than the locals plus their cultures were more family oriented and cooperative - helping each other to succeed.

That usually resulted in them owning homes faster than the locals and thereby earning a level of distrust and resentment from the locals through jealousy. It was the same for each wave of Asian immigrants that followed. Welfare was likely more attractive to existing citizens.

Back in the early seventies I knew a German immigrant who was previously a Professor of Mathematics at a German University but now worked here as a steelworker. All record of his qualifications and supporting documentation were destroyed during the war. When I suggested he attend the local University and try to have his status restored he said he had to feed his family and financially could not afford that option. I found it disappointing but he was simply happy to be here and have a second chance at life.

Hi rache,

Spot on, there was a lot of jealousy among Anglo Australians towards migrants in the 1960's that I can recall. The cry of "The wogs have got all the houses" was common. Southern European migrants were willing to take any job, and work hard to build a better life for themselves and their families, and many succeeded. Today Australia is a far more prosperous country thanks to post war immigration.

rache,,
I knew a PhD who actually was a Doctor of Philosophy and he worked as a welder.
He was a very proficient welder and was usually employed on jobs that had to be perfect, such as large pressure vessels and the like.
I asked him once what philosophy had taught him and he replied that it had taught him to be happy as a welder; he really was happy welding and said that it gave him great personal satisfaction to be doing useful work.

This is not a hard equation.

Less migration has led to more Australians in work and until a short while ago a halt in the slide of stagnant wages.

To return to the levels of pre-pandemic immigration will be a return to higher unemployment and depressed wages.

Why aren't we having that conversation? Even the ABC is touting a return to high immigration levels.

The idea that it fuels economic growth therefore lower unemployment should be denounced largely as a myth. It demonstrably doesn't as the last few years has shown.

We know wages haven't kept up with the cost of living expenses. Instead of prompting businesses to return wages to just compensation and to be paying the kind of tax amounts that would better fund upskilling of Australians we are hearing the clarion call for supercharging immigration once again.

prompting businesses to return wages to just compensation ..
SteeleRedux,
That's the stalemate we're experiencing now ! Very poor educational standards equal very poor mentality & poorly trained people not capable of performing satisfactorily to warrant employing them !