As a result, not only do pubs, restaurants and hotels have fewer patrons; they are running short of staff, too. Bars struggle to serve customers. Hotels have closed rooms for lack of cleaners. “We don’t get Australians applying for this work,” says Liam Ganley, a publican in Melbourne who has been so desperate for staff that he offered to pay for people to migrate from Britain and Ireland. Two of his group’s four venues have cut their opening hours because he cannot fill his roster.
Nor is the labour shortage restricted to big, sexy cities. It hits remote corners of the country, too. Backpackers normally fill jobs in sparsely populated resort towns as they follow the tourist trail along the Great Barrier Reef. They are allowed to extend their stay if they spend time picking fruit and vegetables on farms (though some work in poor conditions, for less than the minimum wage). Before the pandemic, backpackers supplied Australia with 80% of its seasonal farm labour. When they left it created a shortfall of 26,000 harvesters. Some farmers have had to leave crops rotting in their fields.
Australia is struggling to find skilled workers, too. Covid restrictions are not the only reason for that. The government pumped up the economy with fiscal stimulus during the pandemic. Its unemployment rate has plunged by almost two percentage points since covid emerged, to 3.5%, the lowest in nearly half a century. Some half a million positions are sitting unfilled—more than the number of out-of-work Australians. Among members of the OECD, a club of mostly rich countries, only Canada is suffering worse labour shortages. But the border closure also means that Australia has emerged from the pandemic with 500,000 fewer migrant workers than it would otherwise have had, reckons cEDA, a think-tank in Melbourne.
The new Labor government, elected in May, wants immigrants of all stripes to return. On September 2nd Anthony Albanese, the prime minister, said that he would increase the intake of skilled migrants, including nurses and engineers, by more than a fifth, to 195,000 a year. Yet visa-processing has been held up by administrative backlogs. Nearly 1m applications are awaiting approval. To speed up the process Mr Albanese has promised A$36m ($24m) to the home affairs department, which handles visas, so that it can recruit some 500 more staff.
