Whoever wins the 2028 election, Australians have already won the battle over those eye-wateringly high immigration numbers.
For the first time in a generation, Labor, the Coalition and One Nation all agree the numbers must come down, and the only fight left is over how far.
But while they argue over the size of the cut, all three are ignoring the elephant in the room.
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It sits in a giant windowless shed, humming away, quietly hoovering up the tradies we need to build the homes this whole debate is supposedly about.
First, the bidding war. Last week, Angus Taylor promised to slash net overseas migration to 100,000 in the first two years of a Coalition government, calling it “the biggest cut to immigration in the history of this country”.
Temporary visa holders would fall by 650,000 over four years and temporary graduate visas would be scrapped altogether.
Labor is aiming for 245,000 this financial year, easing to 225,000. One Nation, meanwhile, promises that more people will leave the country than arrive over three years.
Barnaby Joyce, ever gracious, congratulated the Coalition for pinching One Nation’s homework.
For context, net overseas migration was 292,100 in the year to March. Whichever way you vote, that number is heading south, and frankly it needs to.
Housing, rents and infrastructure are all bursting at the seams. Taylor wants migration capped at the number of homes we build. Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke says it needs to soften enough for housing to catch up.
The focus on skilled workers is right, because we need nurses, carers, and builders far more than we need another round of visa hoppers.
But here’s what bothers me. Every one of those new homes needs wiring. Every one needs an electrician. And good luck getting one.
We all know it takes more than a sparky to build a house. You also need chippies, plumbers, bricklayers, and tilers, and they’re all in short supply. But electricians face a problem the others don’t: a new rival with deep pockets. And a house without power is just a very expensive shed.
The builders are already feeling it. The Housing Industry Association warns that fewer skilled migrants are making it harder to find the workers needed to fix the housing shortage. Fewer skilled arrivals, fewer apprentices, and a new giant competing for the ones we already have.
That giant isn’t migration. It’s the artificial intelligence boom. In NSW alone, 15 data centre projects worth $51.9 billion are being fast-tracked, on top of about 90 already operating.
Nationally, data centres are forecast to go from using about 2 per cent of the grid’s electricity to about 6 per cent by 2030. These things are enormous, power-hungry, and they need sparkies by the busload.
They can also pay for them. Electrical Trades Union secretary Michael Wright recently told a productivity inquiry that about 10 per cent of the industry is now working on data centre construction, up from zero a few years ago.
The big operators can outbid the rest of the market. The Commonwealth Bank’s own analysis warns that cashed-up data centre operators will crowd out other projects and push up construction costs.
So who loses? The small family-run electrical firm down the road. Small businesses train about 71 per cent of all electrician apprentices in this country.
They take on the teenager, spend four years teaching them the trade, and then watch them walk out the door for a fatter pay packet at a server farm. Some owners are deciding it simply isn’t worth it anymore.
You might think this is a construction blip that will pass once building ends. But with dozens more in the pipeline, it isn’t ending any time soon, and every apprentice a small firm stops training is one fewer sparky a decade from now.
Full disclosure: I’m a fan of practical uses of AI, which, of course, run in data centres. So yes, I am part of the problem. But the irony is the point. AI can find me a cheap fridge, plan my next holiday to Hawaii and explain that plot twist in a book I couldn’t quite get.
But it cannot climb into my ceiling and fix my wiring. Being an electrician is one job the robots can’t take.
Which brings me to the kids. Two of my children are in Year 12, and like most of their friends, they’re deep in university applications.
That’s exactly what we’ve trained a generation of parents and schools to expect.
Yet in all our years of careers nights, I can’t remember a trade getting more than a passing mention, let alone one of the most secure, well-paid, future-proof careers going.
It isn’t for lack of interest, either. Wright says plenty of young people want in. The problem is places, pay and support while they train.
Both major parties say they’ll bring in more skilled workers, not fewer. Labor will fast-track visas for construction workers, and the Coalition has promised an extra 100,000 temporary skilled visas.
But imported tradies have only ever been a trickle. Even the HIA admits only a tiny share of skilled visas go to construction workers.
And whoever does arrive will be fishing in the same small pool as the data centres.
Not one of the migration plans treats training our own as part of the deal. That’s a policy failure. If we’re going to cut migration this hard, we have to grow more of our own tradies, and fast.
I’m not going to pretend I have the answer. Unlike our Federal MPs, I’m not paid more than $200,000 a year, plus a very generous super contribution, to work it out.
But if it were up to me, I’d start by properly funding apprenticeships, helping the small firms that do the training, and making data centre operators put something back into the workforce they’re draining, such as training apprentices as a condition of getting their projects approved.
Cutting migration is the easy bit. The hard bit is making sure someone’s still there to turn the lights on.
