A new Australian Hotels Association advertisement has warned that proposed migration cuts could leave businesses without workers in hospitality, aged care, healthcare, agriculture and other industries.
The campaign uses a darkly comic scenario in which a man presses a large red button labelled “Press button to run Australia without migrant workers”. He then enters an imagined future where the effects of losing the workforce become apparent.
Baristas and bar staff walk out of cafes and pubs, while an aged-care worker says goodbye to an elderly man who tells her he will miss their conversations. In a supermarket, a child asks his father whether he can have the last $47 apple, as the fresh-produce shelves stand empty.
“Where the hell is all the fruit?” the father asks a supermarket employee. “Still on the trees,” comes the reply.
Stephen Ferguson, chief executive of the Australian Hotels Association, said the advertisement was intended to highlight consequences he believes have been overlooked in the political debate over migration.
“I understand Australians are anxious about migration and we completely understand that,” he said.
“But in all the conversations going on about migration, no political party is talking about the knock-on effect of losing workers out of the economy, whether that be workers out of hospitals, aged care, abattoirs, fruit picking, you know, across the whole economy.”
Migration cuts could affect seasonal workers
One Nation has proposed cutting immigration by 750,000 people over three years and taking net overseas migration into negative figures. The Coalition has proposed reducing annual overseas migration by a third in the first year and cutting temporary visa holders by 650,000 over four years.
Under the Coalition plan, Australia’s humanitarian intake would also be halved and the number of working holiday-maker visas reduced by 23,700.
Labor wants net overseas migration reduced to 245,000 by July 2027 and to 225,000 a year thereafter. It also proposes limiting the number of working holiday-makers able to stay for a second year to 45,000, down from 57,000, while third-year stays would be capped at 5,000, compared with 31,000.
Mr Ferguson said Australian businesses wanted to employ local workers first, but often relied on overseas staff when they could not fill roles domestically.
“Every Australian business wants to hire Australians first. But where we don’t have those workers, we’ve got to look to people from overseas,” he said. “We need to get them from somewhere else.”
He said working holiday-makers were particularly important in seasonal industries, moving between northern Australia during colder months and destinations such as Melbourne and northern Tasmania when conditions changed.
“They’re just a mobile, motivated workforce,” Mr Ferguson said, adding that the government’s proposed reduction of about 40,000 workers raised questions about how industries would cope.
He said horticulture operators in far north Queensland were “screaming for workers”, while the advertisement sought to show how the impact of migration cuts could extend beyond the businesses that directly employed overseas staff.
