Foreign workers get to strike gold Down Under

Rebekah Kebede reports from Australian outback mining town Karratha, on the attractive prospects on offer for those willing to dig deep

LUCILLE LIEVAUX, a 25-year-old French geologist, commutes to work on a plane, a 1,300km journey from Australia’s Indian Ocean city of Perth to the mining town of Karratha, a smudge of suburbia on the continent’s barren northwest coast.

Slim, blonde and passionate about her job, she sits in Karratha’s busy single-storey airport, waiting for a jet to take her home. She has swapped her hard-hat and orange-striped overalls for a short-sleeved cotton top, jeans and sneakers. Wearing her sunglasses like a hair-band, she looks out of place in a departure lounge crowded mostly with unshaven men.

Only the dirt beneath her short fingernails and tanned, weathered hands would suggest she has something in common.

“Australia is like an El Dorado,” says Lievaux, who came a year ago on a holiday. She now nets $5,000 (€3,700) a month, working two weeks out of every three at the Whim Creek prospect, an old open-cut copper mine dug out of the red rocky plain.

“It’s so easy, so easy to find a job here as a geologist.”

And it’s so hard for Australia to find enough workers like Lievaux to sustain its mining boom. The tightening labour market is driving up wages, and combined with the resurgent Aussie dollar, is putting pressure on the entire manufacturing sector.

Lievaux may earn about $60,000 (€44,000) a year after tax and be chauffeured to work in a jet, but she is not particularly well paid by the standards of Karratha, an Aboriginal word meaning “good country”, and other remote boom towns.

A mine supervisor can earn in excess of $200,000 (€148,000), more than the head of the Federal Reserve. A truck-driver’s salary easily runs into six figures. A construction worker can make over $150,000, more than a doctor or lawyer.

“You can get girls cleaning at the mine camps and they can easily earn $100,000 a year,” says Tracy Reis, 42, a travel agent based in Karratha.

The reason for this labour shortage, and the sky-high wages that come with it, is simple: Australia, with a population of 22 million, does not have the workforce to exploit its enormous natural bounty — at least not at the pace required to satisfy Asia’s hunger for resources.

The mining and resources industry, including oil and gas, has roughly $400 billion in new projects on the drawing board in Australia and will need another roughly 70,000 workers over the next five years alone, according to government estimates.

The construction industry is projected to need another 196,000 workers over the same period, many of them associated with new mining and energy projects.

The boom is just beginning and, already, labour is short — not just for skilled jobs like geologists but also for unskilled work, creating a situation where even building labourers, cleaners, cooks and drivers are earning stratospheric wages.

But rather than flinging open the doors to foreign guest workers to fill these lower-level jobs, as countries such as Singapore and Dubai have done, Australia is taking measured and, some economists say, inadequate steps to import overseas labour.

Australian mining billionaire Gina Rinehart believes strongly it is time for a rethink.

“Australia needs guest workers,” says the nation’s richest person, with a fortune worth more than $10 billion.

Rinehart is chairman of Hancock Prospecting Pty Ltd and daughter of the firm’s late founder, Lang Hancock, who pioneered the country’s iron ore industry in the 1950s and ‘60s after discovering a mother lode in the rust-red landscape of the northwest Pilbara region, inland from Karratha.

Rinehart has the same flinty reputation as her father, the “king of the Pilbara”, a hard-headed entrepreneur who once proposed using nuclear blasts to develop iron ore ports.

Rinehart says Australia not only needs highly skilled migrant workers — such as French geologist Lucille — but also required unskilled, short-term guest workers for the labour-intensive construction phase of development.

“Guest workers would benefit from jobs in Australia, increasing their skills and enabling them to provide for their own family’s needs, so it is humanitarian assistance for them; in short, a win-win,” she said.

The question of guest workers is larger than the debate over labour shortages. It also touches directly on another important issue facing Australia: rapid population growth and its ability to host the more than 100,000 new settlers every year.

Australia’s egalitarian ideal means all foreign workers have the right to resettle in the country permanently — and very many of them do just that, adding to the strain on national infrastructure such as transport, hospitals and schools.

Even those who oppose the idea of guest workers, based on fears that it could create an economic underclass of outback shanty-town dwellers, concede it has some demographic merit.

Foreign workers who come to Australia on temporary employment visas can bring their families with them and can apply to stay on as permanent residents — and about a third of all such visa-holders are granted residency every year, according to an Immigration Department spokesman.

It may seem odd that Australia, with 22 million people sharing a continent the size of Western Europe, is concerned about population. But the country is mostly arid, forcing about 90% of people to cram into 3% of the country. In 40 years, the population is projected to reach 36 million.