Australia Needs the Right Skills, Not Just Lower Numbers: What Business Leaders Are Saying
News · 2026-08-20 · 4 min read
Australia's migration debate keeps coming back to one figure. Should net overseas migration sit at 245,000? Should the permanent intake fall to 130,000, as One Nation wants? Should it be linked to the pace of house building, as the Coalition proposes? The numbers change from month to month, but the argument stays the same: more migrants or fewer.
Business owners who rely on migrant workers see it differently. For them, the real issue is not how many people arrive. It is who arrives, and which industries they go into.
Aged Care Runs on Visa Holders
Esha Oberoi co-founded Leora Healthcare, which employs roughly 800 people. She says close to half of her staff hold visas. Across the country, she estimates that around one in six aged care workers are migrants.
Demand is set to rise steeply. Within a decade, Australia is expected to add close to 1.5 million people over 65 to the aged care system. That shift will need hundreds of thousands more aged care workers. Local hiring alone is unlikely to fill the gap. Shift-based care work is hard on the body and the emotions, and not many locals are queuing up to do it.
Building Sites Tell the Same Story
Brad Duggan, CEO of Metricon, says some trades, such as plastering and rendering, were effectively built up over the years by particular migrant communities. They filled gaps left when a generation was steered toward university degrees. New home inquiries are down sharply this year. Even so, Duggan argues that migrant labour is not what holds back housing supply. The real limit is a lack of skilled tradespeople willing to do the work at all.
How the Trades Gap Was Made at Home
Duggan's view carries a sharp irony. For a generation, Australia told school leavers that tertiary study was the only serious route to a steady career. In doing that, it emptied out the trades pipeline, and migration has had to fill the hole ever since. If that is right, tightening the visa system without fixing the skills pipeline does not solve anything. It simply takes away the workaround.
Choosing Well Instead of Cutting Hard
Some of the strongest voices against a blunt cut are not calling for open borders. They want better selection.
Ruslan Kogan, founder of Kogan.com, came to Melbourne from Belarus as a child in 1989. He treats the issue as workforce planning rather than immigration. His approach: work out which skills the country will need, such as doctors, engineers, electricians and scientists, and make the path easier for those people, instead of arguing over an abstract cap.
Graham Turner of Flight Centre works in a sector less touched by migration policy than most, yet he reaches a similar conclusion by another route. With population growth slowing across the developed world, he sees migration as the main lever for national growth. For him, the danger is not the total number of arrivals. It is whether the system is set up to bring in people who have the skills, and the willingness, to contribute to the economy.
What South African Tradespeople and Professionals Should Watch
A pattern is forming across the political divide. People who disagree on much else are moving toward the idea that Australia's migration system should work like a targeted recruitment tool, not a tap that is opened or closed. For skilled workers eyeing Australia, especially in aged care, healthcare, construction trades and engineering, that shared direction is worth noting. Demand in those sectors will not disappear, whatever happens to the NOM headline. A system built around matching skills is, if anything, more likely to favour applicants who can show a clear, in-demand trade or qualification than one that simply rations places.
If you hold a South African trade certificate, keep in mind that trades are usually assessed again before you can work in Australia, often through Trades Recognition Australia. Getting your qualifications, references and work history in order now puts you in a stronger position for sponsored jobs for South African tradespeople.
The figure politicians keep fighting over may matter far less in the end than which box your skills let you tick.
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