federal government to increase immigration

The Federal Government will introduce a new unskilled migration program to attract workers in a bid to lessen Australia's labour shortage.

The Government used this week's Budget to announced that migration numbers would be lifted to 300,000 a year, the biggest increase since the post-World War II influx of migrants in 1947.

A spokesman for Immigration Minister Chris Evans says the Government plans to use both skilled and unskilled workers from overseas to address the critical labor shortage.

"Increasingly what we're seeing is a labour shortage that we're not going to be able to meet from inside Australia," he said.

"We've got to decide how we want to respond to that - whether we want to bring in short term, unskilled labour, and if so, under what conditions we bring them in."

Dave R.