Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil has announced Australia’s permanent migration cap will increase from 160,000 to 195,000 for this financial year. 

Addressing the federal government’s Jobs and Skills summit, Ms O’Neil said the temporary increase should see “thousands more nurses settling in the country this year, thousands more engineers”.

“There is nothing in this room with universal support, but an area where almost everyone agrees is that we need to lift the permanent migration numbers for this year.”

The increase is aimed in particular at filling immediate gaps in healthcare, infrastructure and the technology sector. Insiders say the migration cap could remain high for subsequent years too, but there has been no official announcement about the future yet. 

The government’s plan for 2022-23 is to allocate an extra 4,700 places for the healthcare sector, 6,100 additional places for workers with “skills needed to deliver vital infrastructure” and 6,800 places for the tech sector.

Up to 9,000 more regional visas will be offered, as well as another 5,000 skilled visas enabling various businesses to sponsor permanent employees.

State and territory sponsored visa numbers will increase from 11,000 to 31,000.

The increase is reportedly part of a deal between the government, trade unions and business lobbies that aims at increasing the skills and training of locals in the longer-term.

“Our focus is always Australian jobs first, and that’s why so much of the summit has focused on training, and on the participation of women and other marginalised groups,” Ms O’Neil said.

“But the impact of COVID has been so severe that even if we exhaust very other possibility, we will still be many thousands of workers short, at least in the short term.”

The summit is also debating the minimum salary for temporary skilled migrant workers, which has been stuck at $53,900 since 2013. Different voices have called for salaries ranging between $60,000 and $90,000.