Alan Tudge made headlines recently for his grand idea to send migrants to rural Australia.
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Mr Tudge, the Minister for Cities, Urban Infrastructure and Population, is right in the sense we need better distribution of our population, as well as better planning around this growth.
He was also right in that there are jobs – but where, and what sort of skills are needed to fill them?
Census data from 2011-16 shows overseas born migrants are already moving to rural and regional areas.
In NSW, this included 28,234 overseas born migrants, which wasn’t far behind the 39,400 Australian-born residents who also made a tree change.
The data doesn’t show how long these migrants had been in Australia before moving, nor does it show what language they spoke, but it does demonstrate migrants are already a big proportion of those re-populating regional areas.
Among those communities that ranked highly as destinations were Wagga Wagga which welcomed 1169 overseas born migrants, Tamworth 1081, Western Plains Regional Council 1023, Armidale 614, Goulburn Mulwaree 578, Orange 542, Griffith 502, Bathurst 374 and Leeton with 184.
These were just some of the 74 local government areas that received migrant intake in that period from a total of 94 LGAs in NSW.
However, anecdotal evidence suggests many of these migrants still struggle to integrate.
The Land heard this first-hand from rural communities during its The Next Crop forums held through out the year.
While it was suggested rural businesses would find the answers to their skilled labour shortage with migrants, these communities made it clear they first needed on-ground services to support those migrants already there.
Beyond that, it would seem support was also needed in education around how towns can collect data to identify existing job vacancies and required skills and use this to make themselves more visible to governments as priority areas.
The national vacancy index shows vacancies rose in regional Australia by 23pc since 2016 compared to 12pc in metropolitan areas.
So the are jobs out there. We just need targeted settlement services to help kick-start the process.
