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A paper prepared for the Academy of Social Sciences Experts say the country needs toboost immigration by 30 per cent within the next 20 years to meet its growing workforce demand.
Many job vacancies will be created when millions of baby boomers retire. They willalso create the need for more workers to care and cater for them as they age.
Australia has always relied on immigration to fill jobs and keep its economygrowing, but there are now signs the level of immigration will have to ramped up tostop a skills shortage getting worse.
Manpower recruitment company spokesman Steve Hinch says the skills shortage isalready upon us.
"We have 260,000 vacant jobs across this country at the moment," he said.
Australian National University demography professor, Peter McDonald, has beenexamining Australia's population and future labour force needs.
He says rising fertility and immigration levels are not enough to keep the workforce growing.
"Over the last 20 years or so, we've had a growth rate as high as about 2 per cent,and it's now down to about 1.2 per cent per annum," he said.
"If it were to be 1 per cent per annum from now on, the levels of immigrationrequired would be higher than they are now.
"At the moment, they're higher by historical standards."
Professor McDonald says that migration over the next 20 years would need to go up byabout 50,000 per year, from about 170,000 to 220,000 each year.
"Later on, after 20 years, it would be going up again to up around 300,000," he said.
"We also say it's very important to consider domestic skills, that we need to belooking at the production of skills within Australia as well.
"But the notion is that because of increased living standards, because of the needto renew a lot of infrastructure in Australia, because of the ageing of thepopulation - a lot of different reasons - we expect the demand for labour in thefuture to remain very strong."
Baby boomer 'holes'
Mr Hinch says the retirement of 3.5 million baby boomers will leave holes that needto be filled and create more demand for jobs at the same time.
"There will be more to cater for a larger number of really, relatively well-cashedup retirees that are looking to enjoy their life," he said.
"There will be a lot more support jobs... a lot of the older, ageing population thatare currently in their 60s, will be in their late 70s, and 80s at that period.
"There will be more need for medium to low-skilled home care assistants and evenjust in-house care for ironing and those kind of things to assist with an ageingpopulation.
"There will be certainly a massive need for re-skilling and introduction of morenurses, both at the home care level and in the hospice-type level.
"But for the younger boomers that are still going to spend all their money foranother 20 years after that and have fun, there will be an increase in the serviceindustry - from cafes to hairdressers and a lot of those things that requirepeople."
A long queue of willing immigrants has formed behind Australia's skilled migrationscheme.
But Professor McDonald says the bigger challenge is to fill the lower skilled jobs.He is proposing an arrangement with small island nations.
"What we're saying is that there's some of our neighbour countries - the Pacificislands, East Timor - have excess labour," he said.
"All of those countries are very interested in a temporary worker scheme in comingto Australia.
"What we're proposing is that workers could come in on a temporary basis for say,five years and then - so long as they had performed well - become permanentresidents.
"So we don't really want to move away from the emphasis upon permanent migration inthe long-term."
- Simon Lauder, ABC News
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