Skills Over Numbers: What Business Leaders Want From Australia's Migration System
News · 2026-08-20 · 5 min read
Every few months, the migration debate in Australia goes back to the same simple tool: a single number. Should net overseas migration be 245,000? Should the permanent intake be cut to 130,000, as One Nation has suggested? Should the figure depend on how quickly new houses are built, as the Coalition says? The numbers change, but the argument stays the same. It is always more migrants against fewer migrants, as if one dial decides what really matters for the economy.
Business owners who rely on migrant workers see it differently. For them, the real question is not "how many". It is "who", and more exactly, "for which industries".
Care Work Already Leans on Visa Holders
Aged care shows this most clearly. Esha Oberoi is a co-founder of Leora Healthcare, a company with roughly 800 staff. She says close to half of her workers hold a visa. She also estimates that around one in six aged care workers across Australia are migrants.
Demand is only going to grow. Within a decade, Australia is expected to add close to 1.5 million people over 65 to the aged care system. That change will need hundreds of thousands of extra aged care workers. Local hiring alone is unlikely to fill this gap. Shift-based care work is hard on the body and the emotions, and not many local workers are queuing up to do it.
Plastering, Rendering and the Building Trades
The building industry tells a similar story. Metricon CEO Brad Duggan says some whole trades, such as plastering and rendering, have been built up over the years by particular migrant communities. These workers filled skill gaps left behind when a generation of young Australians was pushed towards university degrees.
New home enquiries have dropped sharply this year. Even so, Duggan says the real limit on housing supply is not migrant labour. The real problem is a shortage of skilled tradespeople who are willing to do the work in the first place.
How Australia Created Its Own Trades Gap
There is a sharp irony in Duggan's comments. For a whole generation, Australia told school leavers that university was the only reliable road to a stable career. By doing this, it emptied the trades pipeline. Since then, migration has had to fill that hole. If this is true, then making the visa system tighter without fixing the skills pipeline does not solve anything. It only takes away the workaround.
Picking the Right People, Not Cutting the Total
Some of the strongest voices against a blunt cut are not asking for open borders. They want smarter selection instead.
Kogan.com founder Ruslan Kogan came to Melbourne from Belarus as a child in 1989. He sees the issue less as an immigration question and more as a question of workforce planning. His idea is to work out which skills the country will need, such as doctors, engineers, electricians and scientists, and then make the pathway easier for exactly those people. To him, this is better than arguing about a cap that has no clear link to real needs.
Flight Centre's Graham Turner reaches a similar view from another direction. His own industry depends less on migration policy than most. Still, he believes migration is the main tool for national growth, because population growth is slowing across the developed world. In his view, the real danger is not the total number of arrivals. It is whether the system is set up to bring in people who have the right skills and who are willing to add to the economy.
Reading the Signals as a Skilled Worker
Look closely at this debate and a clear pattern appears. Leaders from very different sides of politics are moving towards the same idea. They want Australia's migration system to work more like a focused recruitment tool, and less like a tap that is simply turned up or down.
For skilled workers thinking about Australia, especially in aged care, healthcare, construction trades and engineering, this is worth noticing. Demand in these sectors will not disappear, whatever the final NOM figure turns out to be. A system built around matching skills is, if anything, more likely to reward applicants who can show a clear trade or qualification that is in demand, compared with a system that only limits places.
Getting Ready From Indonesia
Many people looking for jobs in Australia for Indonesians already have experience in care work, building or technical trades. If that is you, focus on showing your skills clearly. Prepare an English-language CV that lists your trade, your qualifications and your work history. Get your Indonesian certificates translated into English if the visa rules ask for it. If your visa or employer needs an English test, such as IELTS or PTE, plan for it early.
In the end, the number that everyone argues about may matter much less than which skills box you can tick.
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