Tony Burke says AUKUS jobs boom will increase migration pressure

An AUKUS-driven increase in demand for workers in Western Australia and South Australia has prompted Tony Burke to look at overhauling a visa system that State governments complain about every year.

The Home Affairs Minister said there wasn’t a “magic number” for population growth or ideal net migration levels.

But the demand for workers related to the AUKUS submarine building and maintenance programs would be a significant “driver of net overseas migration” in coming years, while the housing shortage would pull in the other direction.

“(Under AUKUS) there are going to be really significant high-paying jobs that a lot of Australians will move to, and we will need to make sure that the jobs they are (leaving) are still back-filled,” he told the National Press Club on Thursday.

“Some of that might be done by Australians moving up a little bit, but I have no doubt there’s going to be some situations in South Australia and Western Australia where AUKUS as a driver of employment is going to create new situations.”

WA Premier Roger Cook and his SA counterpart Peter Malinauskas have both raised AUKUS workforce demands this week as they aired their concerns about the number of skilled visas their State governments will be allowed to sponsor this year.

“It’s reasonable to describe there being quite a different employment market in each state and AUKUS will accentuate that,” Mr Burke said.

He acknowledged housing was also a significant factor for the migration program and that there were communities who were “deeply feeling” the housing shortage.

Some in the Opposition, including Andrew Hastie who quit the shadow Cabinet over the issue, have strongly tied immigration levels to housing.

But while the Government was curtailing net overseas migration, Mr Burke cautioned that cutting too deeply would be just as bad.

“If we go too hard, we will, in fact, reduce our capacity to improve housing supply, or we will mean that farmers won’t be able to get working holiday workers and farm workers, or we will have a situation where our aged care system went into collapse,” he said.

Mr Cook wrote to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese warning that the proposed 32 per cent cut to the number of applications WA can take in this year will only make the tradie shortage worse.

It’s the fourth year in a row the WA Government has complained about its allocated numbers being too low.

In 2023, Mr Cook said the number of places for the previous year – more than 8000 – had been filled in less than nine months.

The Federal Government argues the total number of visas that will be granted to State-nominated places this year will remain at 33,000 – the same as the year prior – but it has reduced the number of new applications the States can sponsor because it’s trying to clear a backlog of people who have been approved but missed out on a spot over the past two years.

Those already in the pipeline will be granted visas first, but the Government doesn’t want to add just as many to the end of the queue.

Mr Burke said WA had historically put in more applications than the number of visas granted, meaning that “what’s being talked about as though it were a cut is not, in fact, a reduction from what the real-life experience” had been.

He’s talking to his department about how to make sure the system is fit for purpose.

“Should we be having a conversation about whether or not there’s a different way of doing this? I think that is the right conversation to have, but we’re early in that part,” he said.