Who, Not How Many: Business Leaders Reframe Australia's Migration Argument Around Skills
News · 2026-08-20 · 4 min read
Australia's migration debate has a habit of collapsing into a single figure. One proposal floats net overseas migration of 245,000. One Nation wants the permanent intake reduced to 130,000. The Coalition prefers to tie numbers to the rate of home building. Each round brings a fresh target, yet the argument stays stuck on the same binary of higher versus lower, as though one setting alone shaped the economic outcome.
Employers who rely on overseas staff see the issue through a different lens. For them the decisive question concerns which workers arrive and which industries they join. That distinction matters to experienced professionals in Dubai, Doha or Riyadh who are considering their next move.
Care Homes Running on Visa Holders
Aged care offers the sharpest illustration. Esha Oberoi, co-founder of Leora Healthcare, runs a business employing roughly 800 people, and she says close to half of that team holds a visa. Across the country, she estimates that about one in six aged care workers are migrants.
Pressure on the sector is building quickly. Within a decade, Australia is on course to bring close to 1.5 million additional people over 65 into the aged care system, a change that will call for hundreds of thousands of extra aged care workers. Shift-based caring is tough both physically and emotionally, and relatively few local candidates are queuing for these jobs, so domestic hiring on its own looks unlikely to bridge the gap.
Plasterers, Renderers and the Housing Crunch
Building sites reveal a comparable pattern. Brad Duggan, CEO of Metricon, notes that whole trades, plastering and rendering among them, were largely established over the years by particular migrant communities. Those workers stepped into skill gaps that opened when a generation of young Australians was steered toward university instead.
Inquiries for new homes have fallen sharply this year. Even so, Duggan maintains that migrant labour is not what holds back housing supply. The real bottleneck, in his view, is a lack of skilled tradespeople prepared to do the work in the first place.
An Unintended Consequence
His observation carries a sharp irony. For a generation, Australia promoted tertiary study to school leavers as the only dependable route to a secure career, and in doing so it drained the trades pipeline that migration has been refilling ever since. If that reading is correct, restricting visas without repairing skills formation leaves the shortage intact and simply removes the workaround.
Precision Over Blunt Caps
Some of the strongest opponents of an across-the-board cut are not campaigning for open borders at all. Their case is for smarter selection.
Ruslan Kogan, founder of Kogan.com, arrived in Melbourne from Belarus as a child in 1989. He treats the matter as workforce planning more than immigration policy: work out which capabilities the nation will need, such as doctors, engineers, electricians and scientists, then smooth the route for precisely those people instead of arguing about an abstract ceiling.
Graham Turner of Flight Centre runs a business less affected by migration settings than most, yet he reaches a similar conclusion by another road. With population growth slowing throughout the developed world, he regards migration as the main lever for national growth. The danger he identifies lies not in the total count but in whether the system is tuned to admit people who are equipped and willing to contribute economically.
Where Demand Is Likely to Hold
Set side by side, these voices from different points on the political spectrum are drifting toward a common idea: Australia's migration system should operate as a targeted recruitment tool rather than a tap opened or closed. For skilled workers weighing Australia, especially those in aged care, healthcare, construction trades and engineering, that shift deserves attention. The leaders quoted expect demand in these fields to continue whatever happens to the headline NOM figure, and a skills-matching approach would tend to favour candidates who can point to a clear, in-demand trade or qualification.
A Note for Experienced Gulf Professionals
If you are exploring skilled jobs Australia from Gulf postings, the debate over caps is less useful to track than the strength of your own profile. Keep qualifications current, document your experience carefully and rely on official Australian sources when assessing an employer-sponsored role. In the end, which box you can tick may count for far more than the number politicians settle on.
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