Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil, speaking to the summit, announced the cap would increase to 195,000 this financial year.
“What it means is thousands more workers, thousands more nurses coming into the country, thousands more engineers so desperately needed coming into the country in this financial year,” Ms O’Neil said at the Jobs and Skills Summit on Friday.

“We’ve got this big backlog when it comes to visas and a lot of business, a lot of employers, would love to employ some of the people caught up in that system – so if we can move quickly on that front, we will,” Dr Chalmers said on Friday.

He also said housing shortages would be a key consideration in any decision to lift the migration gap.

“We think that there is a case to responsibly and cautiously lift the skilled migration cap but not in isolation from housing and not as a substitution for training or getting more people participating in the workforce,” he said.