2 Texans Down Under

Thinking of taking a big leap? Thinking of starting a new chapter in your life and considering Australia as its setting? Then you may be in luck.

The new Rudd Government has announced for the coming fiscal year the biggest annual increase in permanent and temporary migration into Australia since the 1940s, and there doesn’t seem to be much backlash. Some worries, but no real opposition.

The plan is to open the door to nearly 300,000 workers from overseas between July 1 this year and the end of June, 2009, and the work visas will be not only for high-demand jobs, but various kinds of work, skilled and unskilled.

As I noted in my last blog, Treasurer Wayne Swan, speaking for the Labor Government of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, announced this widening of the immigration door in his budget presentation last week and it could be good news for anyone considering moving to the Land of Oz.

(Note: My spell checker IS working. Aussies put a “u” in “labor,” writing it “labour,” but not in the name of the party now in power, Labor.)

Inflation is a hot topic here and business leaders hope opening the door to more migrants will help dampen wage demands. Labour union leaders fear that it might, but they don’t seem to be too worried, only protesting that they need a place at the immigration decision-making table.

The reasons behind this substantial change and the absence of acrimony about it, so far, were expressed in a column May 17 in The Australian by the newspaper’s primary political-affairs editor, Paul Kelly.

Kelly wrote: “Australian labour shortages are here to stay. They are driven by economics and demography. With the retirement of the baby boomers, limits to female workforce participation and the permanence of the China-India resources boom, immigration is returning to centre stage in dramatic fashion.”

The continuing and increasing influx of migrants (my partner and I were part of that influx in 2005) will surely bring new problems for the mass transit systems and roads, the already tight housing market, and attempts to respond to climate change.

In their budget announced last week, Swan and Rudd say they have an answer for those concerns in the form of a “Building Australia Fund” they’ll establish to invest in infrastructure, education, and health.

If you see the need to do nation building at home, it helps to have, as Rudd and company expect to be handed by the booming economy, a surplus of $20 billion for such purposes.

Meanwhile, the Australian dollar hit a new high today, buying about 96 US cents. Some economists here expect parity, equality between the two dollars, in a few months. If you’d have moved here a few years ago, you could have traded every greenback you brought with you for two Aussie dollars.

But you didn’t and we didn’t either. So, maybe now’s the time, if you’re coming. At least every dollar you get paid here will be worth more than it was a while back.