In a submission to the federal government on the size of the immigration programme to be set in the May budget, Australian Industry Group has asked the government to increase intake of immigrants from 190,000 to 220,000 in 2014-15.
"The Australian Workplace Productivity Agency has identified that Australia will need an increase of about 2.8 million people with quite specific skills over the next decade to fill some of those gaps.
“We need to find ways to fill those gaps, and obviously we can train our own, but the quickest stop gap measure is to import skills," the group's chief executive Innes Willox said.
"The proposed increase takes into account the proven benefits to the economy of a strong migration programme.
“An increase in migrant numbers supports positive growth in our population and especially in our adult workforce, which is important due to relatively low rates of natural population growth," he was quoted as saying by the ABC.
A higher skilled migration intake is appropriate at present due to Australia's historically low (albeit growing) unemployment rates; the deepening impacts of our ageing workforce (with 9 per cent of all Australian employees now aged 60 or more and 17 per cent aged 55 or over);
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