Overview
For decades, the hospitality, retail, and service sectors provided young Australians with their first jobs — the kind of work that teaches you to show up on time, deal with customers, manage a shift, and build the habits that carry through a career. Those jobs still exist. But increasingly, they are not going to young Australians.
The reasons are structural, and the Labor government's immigration and visa policy settings have made them worse. This is not an argument against immigration. Australia has always benefited from people who come here to work and build a life. It is an argument against a visa system that is being used by some employers to avoid hiring locally — and against a government that has allowed that to happen without meaningful enforcement.
The question is not whether immigrants should work in Australia. Of course they should. The question is whether the visa system is being used to bypass local hiring — and whether the government is doing anything about it.
What the data shows
Youth unemployment in Australia sits well above the headline unemployment rate. The ABS consistently records underemployment — young people who want more work but cannot get it — at rates that dwarf those of older cohorts. In regional areas, the picture is worse still.
At the same time, Australia's temporary visa intake has remained at historically high levels. The 482 Temporary Skill Shortage visa — designed to allow employers to bring in workers where genuine local shortages exist — has been granted in occupations where no credible shortage can be demonstrated. Hospitality roles, retail supervisory positions, and service industry jobs that young Australians have historically filled are appearing on sponsored visa lists.
The Department of Home Affairs' own data shows that the labour market testing requirements — the obligation on employers to demonstrate they genuinely tried to hire locally before sponsoring a visa — are not being enforced with any rigour. The requirement exists on paper. In practice, it is routinely satisfied with a brief online advertisement and a cursory review.
Visa rorts and local hiring
The problem is not the visa system itself. Temporary skilled migration serves a legitimate purpose when it is used as intended — to fill genuine gaps in specialised occupations where Australian workers are not available. The problem is the gap between the stated purpose of the system and how it is being used in practice.
When an employer can bring in a sponsored worker for a role that a local 19-year-old could fill — and faces no meaningful consequence for doing so — the system has failed. It has failed the young Australian who needed that job. It has failed the integrity of the visa program. And it has failed the broader principle that immigration policy should serve Australia's national interest, not the convenience of employers who prefer not to train local workers.
Labour market testing that takes two days and consists of a single job advertisement is not labour market testing. It is a formality that protects no one.
The communities feeling this most acutely are regional and suburban areas where the service economy is the primary employer of young people. In these areas, the combination of high immigration intake, weak enforcement of local hiring obligations, and a cost-of-living squeeze that makes it harder for young people to move for work has created a structural disadvantage that is not being addressed.
Policy failure
The Labor government has had four years to address the enforcement gap in the temporary visa system. It has not done so. The Migration Amendment (Strengthening Employer Compliance) Act 2023 introduced some new obligations on employers, but the enforcement mechanisms remain weak and the resources allocated to compliance remain inadequate.
Meanwhile, the government has presided over record net overseas migration — over 500,000 in the 2022–23 financial year — without a corresponding investment in the infrastructure, housing, or training programs that would allow the labour market to absorb that intake without displacing local workers, particularly young ones.
The result is a labour market that works well for employers who want flexibility and low costs, and poorly for young Australians who want a first job, a career pathway, and a fair go.
What we need
The policy response is not complicated. It requires genuine enforcement of labour market testing obligations — not a paperwork exercise, but a real requirement that employers demonstrate they have made a serious effort to hire locally. It requires meaningful penalties for employers who use the visa system to avoid local hiring. And it requires a government that is willing to say clearly that immigration policy must serve the interests of Australians already here, including the young Australians who are trying to get their first start.
None of that requires hostility to immigration. It requires a government that takes its obligations to its own citizens seriously — and that is willing to enforce the rules it has already written.
Australians first is not a slogan. It is a policy obligation. The government has the tools to enforce it. It has chosen not to use them.