The Australian budget has been and gone and I didn’t pay that much attention to it to be honest.

Having said all that though a post made in our forums suddenly made me realise that the Australian Budget had pretty large implications for all wannabe Aussies.

The Labor party budget for 2008-09 includes an increase of almost 300,000 visas to Australia in a bid to address labour shortages in Australia.

Federal Treasurer Wayne Swan revealed a healthy increase of almost 300,000 more permanent and temporary visas to Australia as a part of the Labor Party Budget for the 2008-09. This is the biggest annual increase in visas in the history of Australia’s migration program

The new budget accommodates for an extra 31,000 skilled migrant visas, and over 150,000 other permanent migrant visas such as family visas & spouse visas.

This is a pretty large increase over last years and may be a sign of things to come?

There are also 100,000 new temporary work visas available. This move is aimed to address the current skills shortage in Australia, while other initiatives such as training & education have been introduced to provide long term solutions to skills shortages.

These changes are part of the government’s plan to meet the increasing labour demands of Australian businesses. Senator Evans commented “At the moment there is a real constraint on our capacity to grow because we just don’t have enough workers,”.

The end result of these budget changes are that there are now more opportunities than ever before for skilled workers to migrate to Australia, permanently or temporarily to live & work.

Bonza