Nationals Leader David Littleproud has called for the government to pay off student debts for registered nurses who decide to take up jobs in regional Australia.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
Mr Littleproud's pitch ahead of Labor's jobs and skills summit is a plea to ease labour shortages across health and aged care and is part of the Nationals other proposal of a regional skilled visa to get migrants into regional and rural centres.
"We should be saying to some of these graduates where we've got shortages [that we] will pay your HECS if you go and do five years out there," Mr Littleproud told ACM.
"You come debt free and you've probably had a good time and you probably won't leave."
The Coalition when in government began paying off HELP debt for doctors and nurse practitioners who decided to go rural. Mr Littleproud believes this should be extended to professions where there are known shortages like pharmacy.
The junior Coalition partner decided to take up a seat at the summit despite the Liberals rejecting an invite and claiming it would be nothing more than political grandstanding and a talkfest.
Mr Littleproud said it was important that regional voices were heard at the summit, which is shaping up to be a discussion around enterprise bargaining reform and migration.
Treasurer Jim Chalmers on Wednesday hinted possible changes to the better-off-overall-test as part of his last-minute pitch to the public about how the summit would tackle stagnating wages and trying to drive up economic productivity.
"This is all about bringing people together to confront our most pressing economic challenges, to address stagnant wages and skill shortages and to strengthen the economy in a way that there are more opportunities for more people in more parts of our nation," Dr Chalmers said.
READ MORE:
However Mr Littleproud did note the summit was showing an overrepresentation of unions and should be focused more on the bigger issues such as adequate education, developing jobs for the future and fixing skill gaps.
In his own electorate, the Nationals leader flagged local pubs are unable to offer meals due to not being able to find cooks within the area who could fire up a grill.
"They can't find cooks to do pub meals in western Queensland," he said.
"These people made a capital investment that they have to get a return ... otherwise they go broke and that's what we're seeing in regional Australia."
The Nationals also believe skilled migration - particularly for agriculture - needs to be expanded to South East Asia, rather than relying just on Pacific workers.
The agriculture sector alone is facing labour shortfalls of more than 170,000 workers and Mr Littleproud explained the existing Pacific scheme does not come close to fulfilling the needs of the country and the shortfalls were attributing to higher cost pressures.
Around 52,000 people can come to Australia through the Pacific visa scheme. Within agriculture that is a shortfall of around 120,000 workers.
"We're competing with other industries across the economy around those workers from the Pacific," Mr Littleproud said.
"I would have thought it's important to have good geopolitical relationships in South East Asia as well with Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand just the same as it is with the Pacific."
Dr Chalmers outlined outcomes of the summit are set to be delivered at the end of the Friday session.
"What we would like to do is to agree to a handful of more-or-less immediate actions and announce them on Friday afternoon along with the areas where there's sufficient common ground for more work to be done," he said.
The Treasurer was also left to defend the guest list of the summit which revealed roughly 25 per cent of seats were given to unions, but claimed employers made up a larger proportion of invitees.
"We've got a good representative cross section of the Australian economy and the Australian community, and we can't lose sight of the bigger picture here, which is trying to find some common ground about our big economic challenges," Dr Chalmers said.
