The 1978 Immigration Decisions and Their Impact on the Australian Labour Force

Considering the significance of the decision to increase the immigrant settler intake to 90000 for 1978-79 there has been remarkably little public information or public debate on How the Federal Government came to make such a decision given the high and increasing unemployment situation How this decision is going to be implemented i.e. what criteria will be used to select migrants and How the migrants selected will affect the Australian labour market made available to the interested public. The Immigration Department has kept to itself the internal background papers prepared to explain and justify its proposals and the details on how it intends to implement its proposed policy changes. The goal of this paper is to help rectify this information gap and in the process contribute to an open debate on the consequences of present immigration policy both as regards to the numbers and characteristics of the migrants to be recruited. These consequences will be serious. The present recruitment programme is bad enough. Though it is supposedly influenced by labour market consideration as I will demonstrate below thousands of migrants are still arriving with occupational skills surplus to Australian needs. The proposed increase in numbers and new recruitment scheme will make this situation even worse. (excerpt)