It seems a perfect solution. Australia needs workers for seasonal and mining jobs; The Pacific Islands and East Timor, with high birth-rates and much of their populations under 25, have up to 65% youth unemployment. Let their young people come here as temporary labour. Neat. Two problems solved. Temporarily.
It is a dangerous stop-gap for the Islanders unless also family planning cuts family sizes down to four or less. These islands have populations growing to the degree that their own resources cannot support them. The average woman in East Timor has eight children = 64 grandchildren = 512 great-grandchildren. Despite all the causes of high death rates, the quite small island of East Timor, only 15,000 square km, with a rural economy and relying perhaps too heavily on future oil and gas revenue from the Timor Sea, and a population of under half a million in 1950 is now heading for going on two million by 2050. The islands of Tonga, population 45,000 in 1950, are now over 100,000 in only 50 years. The Solomon Islands, in only one hundred years, will grow from just over 100,000 in 1950 to a million in 2050. How many of these growing populations of the Islands can be employed as temporary labour or even be permanent immigrants to Australia? Not the scores of hundreds of thousands that will be needed. Surely family planning opportunities must be tied to all aid, with the Western countries set as examples of how higher standards of living are related to smaller families.
Secondly, countries no longer able to rely on their own resources and industries, like Tonga and the Philippines, (21 million in 1950, 79 million now, and heading for 157 million by 2050) are now relying heavily on funding sent by expats, which is now 70% of Tonga’s GDP. An Australian working in Tonga observes that this is encouraging Tongans to continue to have large families, so they can have more expatriate income. A disastrous strategy.
Aid for countries in trouble must focus primarily on how these countries can be viable in the global economy, without stripping their own resources, such as timber and fisheries.
#AustralianBenefits" id="AustralianBenefits">Australian 'benefits'
For Australia, short-term migrant workers may seem ideal – they work hard, and they are glad of wages and conditions that Australians refuse. If industries wane, there is no Australian problem of redundant workers.
But how, in the global economy, can our industries afford the wages and conditions that would attract Australian workers to these short- term or seasonal jobs? We have young unemployed Australians, including indigenous people accustomed to hot climates – how can they become employable? Outback communities sometimes have hardly anyone able to take on a fulltime job even in nearby mining industries, through problems of alcohol, illiteracy and no motivation. What sort of culture do we need for the experience of hard productive labour and different scenery to be an adventurous part of growing up? And a way to see how our industries work, of permanent value for their future employment, whatever it is. Indeed, how unbalanced are our patterns of youth employment?
Look ahead to what may be the demands for jobs to meet the challenges of climate changes, and possibly of some global economic chaos as well. Are we over-investing in jobs such as IT, PR, entertainment, financial money-making, law, and cafes? And too little in practical skills of growing, and making, and organizing productive businesses that underlie our present and future quality of life?
Even our program of importing skilled professionals under short-term visas is short-sighted - as we fail to give our own young people a decent chance to learn those skills, and other more needy countries pay the cost of training their exported skills.
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