Our demand for skilled workers has increased by 88 per cent compared to 34 per cent in Melbourne. Across the same period our unemployment rate has remained below four per cent even as low as 1.4 per cent and consistently below the average for regional Victoria, Victoria and Australia.
If around four per cent unemployment is considered full employment, then it’s obvious we have a chronic workforce challenge.
There are several ways to tackle our workforce challenge. We can limit the leakage by providing local training pathways, we can encourage talent to bring their experience home, we can activate our harder-to-employ cohorts by reshaping our expectations and our roles, we can remove the obstacles to participation through transport, childcare and flexible work arrangements.
But every one of these options assumes that we have enough people in Australia to start with.
According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, Australia’s total fertility rate is around 1.4 and has been below the replacement rate of 2.1 since 1976 — that’s 50 years ago.
According to the United Nations, the world’s population is still increasing, but 2020 to 2025 marks the slowest growth rate in modern history and global population growth has fallen to less than one per cent a year and will continue to decline.
Earlier projections often had the world’s population peaking around the 2080s; more recent work suggests that peak could come closer to 2060.
Closer to home, without migration Australia’s population will flatten by 2030 and begin to decline from the late 2030s — about a decade from now.
Even after allowing for migration Australia’s fastest growing population groups through to 2050 will be 65 years-plus — mostly retired and moving into life stages that require greater care and support.
This group will increase from around 19 per cent of the population today and could reach almost one in three by 2050, and in regional Victoria our median age will be a decade older than in metropolitan Melbourne.
If we somehow lifted our current fertility rate to the replacement rate of 2.1 and held it there through to 2050, while maintaining current migration settings, we’d have a larger population and importantly a larger working‑age population.
But most of those extra workers wouldn’t reach the labour market until the 2040s and 2050s, so it wouldn’t solve the workforce crunch we face in the next two decades.
These trends explain why migration has and continues to be such a vital part of our nation’s success.
But it’s not easy — we are competing with almost every other nation for an increasingly scarce supply of humans — skilled, low-skilled and unskilled.
Our Community Connector’s participation in graduate and international recruitment fairs highlights the challenge in positioning Australia and Greater Shepparton as the preferred destination.
It begins with what our potential talent sees and reads on social media and hears through word of mouth — and it is reinforced by the first experiences of their new home town and region.
A positive outward-facing posture is essential, and backing it up with services like the Community Connector is vital, but it is also where our region’s ‘migration match fitness’ is so valuable.
The data suggests that attracting migration won’t be enough on its own.
The only sustainable path is to automate wherever we can, and use our people where human judgment, empathy and creativity matter most — while our technology steadily evolves to do more with us and for us.
Across food manufacturing, healthcare, and other traditionally labour‑intensive sectors, Australia is now seeing automation investment in the order of several hundred million dollars each year — driven by major factory upgrades, AI‑enabled healthcare platforms, and adoption of robotics and digital transformation.
Our region’s efforts are delivering results, with our food manufacturing sector’s workforce productivity increasing by 23 per cent since 2008 — and achieving a regional average that is better than the regional Victoria, Victoria and Australia.
The combination of automation and migration is not new — together they have been making us better, faster and smarter for decades.
For Greater Shepparton, the path forward is clear. We must continue to attract the people we need, deploy technology where it adds the most value, and build a region that is easy to move to, easy to work in and easy to stay in.
Our ability to compete — for investment, for talent, for new industries — will depend on how well we combine these two forces: a modern, automated economy and a welcoming, globally connected community.
If we get this right, Shepparton won’t just keep pace with change; we’ll set the pace for regional Australia.
Linda Nieuwenhuizen is the Committee for Greater Shepparton chief executive
