Welcome,
Prime Minister Scott Morrison has acknowledged the challenges facing NT businesses in the hospitality and tourism sectors in terms of finding staff to deal with the influx of tourists expected over the months ahead. The Federal Government’s airfares incentive scheme is much appreciated and hopefully will prove a windfall for these sectors which were dealt a heavy blow by the COVID pandemic, but finding the workforce to accommodate our visitors is a very real issue.
Of course, it is not just the hospitality and tourism sectors that are struggling to find personnel. The rest of the country is picking up, and there is simply not the mobile workforce available to fill our needs from within Australia. The training and upskilling of our own NT workforce will always be the number one priority, followed by recruitment from interstate. However, the north of the country has also relied to a large degree on overseas skilled and semi-skilled migration.
Clearly, recruitment from overseas is a very difficult proposition in the current pandemic times, but if the NT is going to surge forward as we’re predicted to do, we have to think outside the box to access the skillsets we need. We have a DAMA (Designated Area Migration Agreement), we have a quarantine facility and we have the Prime Minister’s attention. Perhaps the answer lies somewhere within.
Kevin Peters
Chief Executive Officer