Thank you Deputy Speaker.

According to the OECD, Australia is experiencing the second most severe labour shortage in the developed world, exacerbated by COVID-19 and 10 long years of policy neglect.

Australian businesses are crying out for workers.

Migrants who have made or want to make Australia home have been trapped in an administrative limbo for years.

It’s no secret that the cost of living has always been higher in the regions, and that’s absolutely the case up north.

I’ve spoken to businesses and industry groups across my electorate about what challenges they’re facing, and by far the biggest concern is the worker shortage.

The Skills and Training Minister was recently in Darwin to meet with a broad cross-section of industry and they all told him the same thing:

The lack of skilled workers is adding to the increased cost of living, and the Northern Territory has a number of compounding factors which have made these problems more acute than elsewhere.

Unfortunately, the previous Government left our migration system and education and training sectors in crisis.

Now, migrants are choosing other nations ahead of Australia because their systems are simpler, quicker, and cheaper to navigate.

They didn’t want to sit around waiting for years for us to decide whether we could use their skills or not.

They moved on – and now we’re caught short.

The migration system the previous Government left behind is crushing small business in the Territory, and pushing many of them to the brink.

These businesses are finding it exceedingly difficult to hire skilled staff.

And the processing times for visas means they’re waiting far too long – many months, and often years, for an application to be processed.

The feedback I’ve had from Hospitality NT and other industry stakeholders is that restaurants in Darwin and Palmerston are finding it incredibly difficult to find chefs and floor staff, and are closing mid-week.

Or they’re only opening a few nights a week, or having to close the kitchen early when they do open.

Other hospitality venues are finding it hard to serve their customers – they just simply can’t hire enough staff.

But just because they’re closed doesn’t mean that their leases and overhead costs are any lower, and those are costs passed onto their customers.

And when their customers are facing their own problems – real wage decline, increasing interest rates and increases in cost of living – many who would ordinarily be patrons are choosing to stay home.

I get it.

But this means a decline in economic activity and a decline in the standard of living across the board.

There’s not a lack of people wanting to work, there’s a lack of a system which facilitates it.

So we’re fixing migration, and we’re fixing training, with a $1 billion National Skills Agreement to support access to 180,000 fee-free TAFE and vocational education training places from January.

These places will provide training for priority groups, increase workforce participation and address skills gaps.

The previous government couldn’t get a single jurisdiction to sign up to their skills agreement.

They neglected the vocational education and training system and failed to do the work needed to reform the skills and training sector.

But we will, and we are.

We’re a Government that will deliver better outcomes across the board and delivering improved living standards – for all Australians who want to contribute to making this country an educated, skilled, successful, and vibrant place to live.