New data has revealed the dire post-Covid worker shortage is crippling the industry, with almost three quarters of operators citing the issue as their most critical pressure.Industry figures say the shortages go beyond unskilled labour, with jobs including tour guides, marketing and communications specialists and team leader roles not being filled.A survey of hundreds of Victorian operators by the Australian Tourism Industry Council found:• Almost three quarters of respondents nominated lack of casual staff for peak periods and events as their most critical shortage pressure.• Sixty-nine per cent of respondents noted seasonal staff shortages in peak periods, and.• About half cited shortages of part time staff for regular peak periods as causing the most pressure in their business.Tourism industry leaders are set to address the issue at a jobs summit in Canberra this week convened buy Federal Trade and Tourism Minister Don Farrell.Victorian Tourism Industry Council chief Felicia Mariani said an exodus of workers during the pandemic had devastated the sector.They included international students, backpackers and visa holders who hadn’t returned to Victoria.“The current skills and workforce shortages have reached crisis proportions for businesses operating in Victoria’s visitor economy, and represents the single greatest impediment to the recovery of the state’s vibrant and critical tourism industry,” Ms Mariani said.“There is no shortage of demand for visitors to travel across our state, but increasingly our ability to service this demand is being put under extreme pressure.“Most concerning is when we look at the most critical impacts of skills shortages on business operations, with three-quarters of businesses noting the extreme stress that has being placed upon remaining workers and the owner/operators of these businesses. Over half have also said they’ve reduced their hours of operation, the availability of rooms, or the operation of their services due to staff shortages.”Ms Mariani said government had to address migration as a way of getting overseas workers back into the industry.“There is no silver bullet to fix the complexity of employment issues that have emerged in the current landscape, but we must make a start by activating some critical short term solutions to ameliorate these pressures, while we implement medium to longer-term strategies around attracting people back to the sector,” she said.“Migration must be in the mix of solutions we embrace to remove the extreme stresses being experienced right now, but the industry is fully prepared to develop and implement a suite of solutions that will set a course back to normalcy for us. This will require wholesale structural reform in our employment practices and it’s imperative that Australia takes these steps urgently,” she said.Daniel Andrews said this week he would be pushing the Commonwealth government to improve Australia’s skilled migration intake.“I don’t think that temporary visas are necessarily the way to go,” he said.“I think pathways to citizenship so you can come here, build a career, build a life and be part of Victorian community, be part of our Australian community, I think that’s absolutely the way to go.“That’ll be something that I’ll be pushing for. Both Dominic Perrottet and myself have written to the Prime Minister, we wrote very early on, saying that a bigger skilled migration intake was critically important. “Everywhere I go, every single sector, it’s not that there’s a shortage of customers, it’s that there’s a shortage of staff.”Victorian Opposition Leader Matthew Guy on Friday told a Victorian Chamber of Commerce and Industry function sustained border closures, internationally and across state borders, had damaged Australia’s reputation.“We need to market our state again. We are losing population,” he said.“It’s not just losing people, it’s a brain drain. We need to encourage it back. To do that the government needs to have serious strategies … Where we are seeking people, seeking aggressively, to come back to Victoria.“The state government needs to be aggressive about this. We must provide an incentive to get those workers back.”
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