Pack your backpacks, Australia needs you!

Businesses in Australia are facing the worst labour and skills shortage in more than three decades, according to the country’s Chamber of Commerce and Industry.

To plug the mass vacancies in the jobs market, the government is trying to entice backpackers and gap-year students with cash, promising to reimburse them for the costs of their visas, it was reported this week.

After two years of hermetically sealing the borders, the federal government is now panicked that its Covid measures have put off the country’s traditional supply of temporary migrant workers for good.

It is tempting to say “serves them right.” Why should young people today even begin to contemplate a far-flung destination that has become notorious for liberty stripping its own people, at home and abroad?

When the Delta variant arrived in Australia last year, teenagers were handcuffed for meeting outside and the military patrolled neighbourhoods to enforce lockdowns that were among the most draconian in the world.

More recently, the debacle over Novak Djokovic’s failed bid to take part in the Australian Open has, whatever your views on the Serb’s anti-vax stubbornness, served as perfect counter-propaganda for the Australian tourism industry.

Look what happens to big shots when they try to get into Australia these days. Imagine ordinary folk travelling the ten thousand plus miles, if they are British, only to be turned back at Botany Bay, where planes fly into Sydney Airport more than 250 years after Captain Cook made landfall.

Or, worse, imagine being allowed in and not being let out for two years, a predicament suffered by many foreign nationals trapped by Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s misguided zero Covid strategy.

Who in their right mind would succumb to the PM’s pathetic pleading to “come on down” now he has seen the error of his puritanical pandemic policies?

How different a proposition Australia seemed more than 30 years ago, the last time it cried out for labour reinforcements and droves of intrepid young Brits answered with their feet.

It was around then that I joined the increasingly fashionable British exodus to the Antipodes, lured by the new points system that made it relatively easy for young travellers to obtain work permits.

At the time I applied, the “wanted” list of skilled workers included, among others, pastry chefs, mechanics, nurses, and newspaper sub-editors, and extra points were awarded for youth and qualifications.

Once there, continuous employment for two years entitled you to residency, after which they practically begged you to become an Australian citizen.

Since I didn’t have to surrender my British nationality, and was rather enjoying the beach and barbecue lifestyle, not to mention the generous remuneration courtesy of Rupert Murdoch, I went for it.

I have since learned that 130,312 people were granted Australian citizenship in 1989–90, the most in any year in the twentieth century, so I was not a special case.

But I treasured my Australian passport then and still do, as a token, most likely useless now, of a golden period in a parallel universe.

Scott Morrison is not handing out passports, just up to £350 for (vaccinated) groups such as overseas students, skilled workers and working holidaymakers, who have been permitted entry since December, though overseas tourists remain banned.

He needs them, desperately, to prop up the ailing economy much as we did all those years ago, in Bob Hawke’s day.

The farming and hospitality sectors are said to be in the direst need, with farmers having to leave fruit and vegetables unpicked (and sheep unsheared?), and restaurants and bars forced to reduce their opening hours, The Times reported.

But the sheen has come off Australia for the post-pandemic generation, and what was once a rite of passage has become a paradise too far.

Junior doctors, for example, used to flock to Australian hospitals for a couple of years for the much better pay and work/life balance, before heading back to the UK for serious training and to settle down.

Now NHS doctor jobs are much more competitive in the UK because young medics are staying put, no longer as interested in the Oz sabbatical, according to anecdotal evidence.

To them, and to other twentysomething professionals and would-be wanderers, I would say, give it a go. Not because Australia deserves our best young people – it doesn’t, especially not after its xenophobic hysteria these past two years.

But what better way to cast off the constraints of Covid, that have turned a nation of globetrotters into parochial shadows of our former selves, than heading to the furthest reaches, almost, of the earth?

I haven’t been back for years but what won’t have changed is the dazzling light, the contrasting landscapes of fabled coastlines and dusty red interiors, the for-real fantastic beasts, the funny (in the humorous sense, mostly) Australians, and the horizon-broadening perspective of regarding the world from the land down under.

Don’t marry Australians and stay there – we need you here – but spread your wings, reclaim the skies, and put travel back on the map.

As Tennyson’s Ulysses sort of said: push off, it’s not too late to seek a newer world!