In 2024-25, net overseas migration added 306,000 people to Australia, on the Bureau of Statistics’ latest figures. Against this river, the government points to its permanent Migration Program, 185,000 places, capped, planned, selected, of which 132,148 sat in the Skill stream. Jobs and Skills Australia, a second agency of the same government, assessed 1,022 occupations in 2025 and found 293 of them in national shortage. To a new arrival from a country where all of that would count as luxury, the same Australia reads as deliverance. The skills shortage was the alibi.