Violet Roumeliotis AM: National Press Club address

** CHECK AGAINST DELIVERY **

Opening: the waiting room costing us all

Thank you to the National Press Club, and thank you all for being here.

I acknowledge the Traditional Owners of the land we meet on today, the Ngunnawal and Ngambri peoples, and pay my respects to Elders past and present.

I’ll start with something familiar to all Australians: a waiting room.

A patient told it will be months before they can have elective surgery.

A family waiting for their new home to be finished because there aren’t enough tradies.

A child waiting to see a speech pathologist.

But there is another room. A waiting room of wasted talent.

It’s filled with people invited to Australia because we need their skills: doctors, nurses, aged care workers, tradespeople, engineers, speech pathologists.

They are not waiting because they lack skills. They are waiting because of slow, unfair and expensive processes to simply recognise their skills.

Two rooms, side by side. And a wall between them.

That wall is Australia’s current skills and qualifications recognition system. It stops people from fully contributing due to barriers that have nothing to do with their skills – excessive fees, unnecessary paperwork and unfair practices. For many, it costs tens of thousands of dollars and can take years to go through the recognition process.

This might sound like an inconvenience, but the consequences are far-reaching.

Right now, forty four percent of qualified permanent migrants are working below their skill level… Forty four percent.

That is about six hundred and twenty thousand people not working in their trained professions, while we have critical shortages in those same fields.

The numbers speak for themselves.

There are forty-seven thousand migrant engineers in this country working below their skill level right now, at the same time the national shortfall of engineers has reached a decade high.

There are twenty thousand underutilised teachers, when eight in ten public schools are grappling with teacher shortages.

And there are thirteen hundred electricians not using their skills in the middle of the worst housing crisis in a generation.

We are all paying the price for failing to use the immense talent already in this country.

Two out of three underutilised permanent migrants in Australia arrived through the skilled migration stream. These are people we have actively selected and invited because we need their skills, and yet our systems prevent them from putting those skills to use once they arrive.

The culprit is a completely disconnected system. To come to Australia as a skilled migrant, you must have your qualifications and experience assessed to secure a visa. But once you arrive, those assessments count for almost nothing. You’re forced to navigate a separate onshore process to recognise your skills and get licensed to practise. A process that totally ignores the assessments you’ve already done. It’s just ridiculous and completely inefficient. Who in this room would argue that this makes sense?

Put simply, it’s a system that is not delivering what it was designed to do. It is meant to ensure there is quality expertise serving our communities but, in many cases, it is needlessly holding that expertise back. This of course affects skilled migrants, but it also affects every one of us.

Imagine if we could activate those much-needed skills while upholding the high standards Australians expect.

The campaign narrative: from human issue to national priority

The Activate Australia’s Skills campaign began with what SSI and our partners kept hearing again and again.

People arrive here ready to contribute. They have qualifications, experience and a strong desire to work.

But they hit a system that feels like we don’t want them to fully contribute  —  at least not in the job they are qualified and skilled to do. We have built this campaign from lived experience into a national reform agenda — one that unlocks productivity and improves essential services for all Australians.

More than 130 organisations are now backing these reforms.

There is overwhelming consensus across civil society, unions and business that skills recognition reform is THE productivity boost Australia is missing.

People can see the waste. And government will increasingly bear the economic and political cost of leaving this system broken.

Our esteemed guest Martin Parkinson will speak in detail about the economic case – but the politics of this issue are just as compelling.

Define the political problem: inaction now has a cost

And the political problem is straightforward.

First, there is a credibility test. We hear that productivity is vital to our economic growth, yet this issue is literally holding back the productivity of hundreds of thousands of people right now.

Second, this directly affects consumers and drives up costs in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis. Wasting skills and expertise while Australians face rising costs and longer waiting lists is indefensible.

Third, there is an employer consequence. Employers want workforce solutions, not broken bureaucracy.

There is now a clear political moment – and a mandate for reform. Fixing skills recognition was the top area of consensus at the Treasurer’s Economic Reform Roundtable last year.

What action looks like

Let me be clear: the consensus is in. We don’t need another review. We need action.

The reform package we have is practical. It is ready. It is costed. 

It is built to uphold Australia’s high professional standards across all industries while removing unnecessary barriers that keep people stuck on the sidelines.

It is about replacing confusion and delay with clear pathways, consistent assessment and real accountability.

Done well, skills recognition reform will lift standards and strengthen public confidence in the system.

At a high level, the package introduces accountability through end-to-end oversight of the system, reduces cost barriers, creates clearer employment pathways for migrants and employers, and ultimately helps people move into the roles Australia needs.

Relative to the size of the prize, it is also a modest investment: forty six million dollars over four years when billions of dollars in benefit is on the table.

Human reality, used as political evidence

Now I want to show you what we are losing because of this broken system.

This is wasted national capacity in real terms.

Antonio is a physiotherapist from Chile. He is a trauma recovery specialist and treated over twenty thousand patients before coming to Australia.

He has spent years and over ten thousand dollars going through the skills recognition process. This included multiple exams, each of which required a separate trip interstate because they were only offered in one location in the whole of Australia. It’s just ridiculous.  

To pay for the exams and travel, Antonio worked casual jobs: cleaning, hospitality, construction.

He would hear construction workers in severe pain say they could not get a physio appointment for months, and there he was – blocked from helping them.

Today, Antonio is a Research Associate and Lecturer in the Doctor of Physiotherapy program at one of Australia’s leading universities… If he can train physiotherapists, surely he could practise as one!

Just weeks ago, after nearly nine years, he was finally able to complete the process.

He said: “I chose this career because I was making a difference in people’s lives. I want to keep doing that in the country and the community I now call home.”

Apolinario is a nurse from the Philippines. She has worked as a nurse in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Ireland. In each of these countries, her qualifications were recognised quickly and seamlessly.

In Australia, the process was long, confusing and costly. She described the impact of being qualified but blocked from contributing.

She said: “You know you can help, but you can’t. That waiting eats at you. Every month that passes, your skills feel like they are rusting.”

Consuelo is a teacher, also from Chile, with seven years’ experience.

She sought guidance on how to gain recognition and was passed from one organisation to another, each offering conflicting advice. One said she needed an Australian diploma. Another said her degree could not be recognised. A third charged over one thousand dollars simply to review her academic documents. None could give her a clear pathway forward. Because, believe it or not, there is no single source of information on how to get your skills and qualifications recognised in Australia.

Consuelo described feeling hopeless and discouraged.

When you hear these stories together, a pattern emerges.

This is not about individual shortcomings. It is about a system that makes it unnecessarily hard for qualified people to contribute.

According to Deloitte Access Economics, nine billion dollars could be added to Australia’s economy each year if permanent migrants living here worked in jobs that matched their skills at the same rate as Australian-born workers.

That is why this belongs squarely on Australia’s productivity agenda.

Every migrant who works in their licensed profession boosts our productivity by about forty-three thousand dollars per year.

It is a measurable economic gain.

But it also has a human dividend Australians intuitively support: people contributing at their level, paying tax, building a life, and strengthening the communities they are part of.

The political invitation to the Treasurer and Cabinet

So here is the invitation to the Prime Minister, the Treasurer and their Cabinet.

You have an opportunity to address a decades-long drag on productivity.

You have acknowledged the need for skills recognition reform. It was the top area of consensus among union and business leaders at your productivity summit. Since then, every state and territory has endorsed the need to improve skills recognition.

Now, that consensus must lead to action.

For you, this is a clear next step on both policy and politics.

The solutions are ready. They are costed, carefully designed based on world-best practice, and ready to go. There is broad national consensus and a clear political mandate.

Taking action would demonstrate practical leadership on productivity and service delivery, at a time when Australians are looking for solutions that deliver real, tangible results.

What success looks like is simple:

A system where qualified people have a clear recognition pathway, get assessed quickly and fairly, can afford any gap training or recognition of prior learning required, and move into work quickly, with employers able to trust the process and Australians able to trust the quality. 

We call on Cabinet to fund this package in this Budget and get on with skills recognition reform – to show that productivity reform can deliver real results: a stronger economy and better services for Australians.

Everyone wins if we get this right – patients, families, businesses and skilled people ready to contribute.

No more waiting. It is time to act.

Thank you.