Opinion
If someone suggested setting fire to a building that was already smouldering, in order to put the fire out, you’d rightly consider them crazy. If someone suffering from mild arsenic poisoning decided to chug a litre of it to cure themselves, you’d lock them up for their own good.
Put such a loon in charge of public policy, though, and they’re treated as sages.
A surge in Chinese, Korean and Punjabi-speaking construction workers and a fall in Italian, Greek, Balkan and Arabic speakers on Australian building sites have sparked warnings of labour shortages and construction cost blowouts under current migration settings.
New analysis of census and industry data shows that unless the Albanese government unlocks new construction migration pathways, Labor’s pledge to build 1.2 million new homes over five years has “little chance” of success.
As if it ever had more chance of success than Kiwibuild.
Still, we have a housing crisis caused by mass immigration (currently running at nearly 600,000 per year), and the proposed solution? More immigration.
Forget about saving these loons from themselves — save the rest of us from the consequences of their madness.
Housing Industry Association executive director Geordan Murray said despite the building industry commanding 9 per cent of the nation’s total workforce, builders haven’t “been able to attract a proportionate share of the migrant workers who come to Australia”.
Which is, to be fair, half a point. If we’re going to be swamped with migrants, why not at least make sure they’re skilled and speak reasonable English?
Yeah, about that.
HIA analysis reveals a major pivot to Asia, with a 56 per cent increase in construction workers speaking a language other than English.
Between 2011 and 2021, the construction workforce grew 29 per cent, with the number of workers who reported speaking English at home rising by 25 per cent.
Australian Bureau of Statistics census data shows 16.4 per cent of the total construction workforce speaks a language other than English at home, with more than 200 languages and dialects spoken by builders.
Maybe we could specialise in building Towers of Babel. Oh, wait — we call those “parliament house”.
Mr Murray, who leads the HIA’s future workforce and industry research unit, said if the construction sector was able to recruit migrant workers proportionate to its 9 per cent share of the workforce, the industry “would have received 40 per cent more migrant workers, over 33,000 additional workers”.
Oh, yay: another few tens of thousands of migrants. Just what we need.
The HIA and Master Builders Australia have raised concerns the Albanese government’s migration review failed to address the need for targeted and faster pathways for skilled construction workers […]
Mr Murray said the increased cultural and linguistic diversity in the construction sector over the past decade “reflects Australia’s success as a multicultural society.”
The Australian
Coincidentally, the second-largest non-English-speaking group in the construction industry is Arab. Can the building lobby really look at what happened in Sydney on October 8, or what happened in Melbourne a few weeks ago that I can’t tell you about, and really brag about Australia’s “success as a multicultural society”?
The only migration review we need is just how many hundred thousand they’re going to slash from the annual intake. We wouldn’t have to import tens of thousands of shonky foreign builders if we weren’t importing hundreds of thousands of foreigners, all demanding homes that even Australians increasingly can’t afford.