Social care and migration policy in Australia: Emerging intersections?

Migrants are important both as providers and users of paid care services in Australia, yet migration has rarely featured in Australian strategies to grow and sustain the paid care workforce. Correspondingly, Australia is rarely mentioned in the international scholarship on care and migration that has burgeoned since the 1990s. This article shows the ways that service providers, consumer advocates, unions and scholars have begun to bring migration into debates about workforce growth in two of Australia's most significant areas of paid care: aged care and childcare. Drawing on submissions to national enquiries in both areas, we identify the actors who have sought to adjust Australia's migration settings to respond to growing demand for care, and explain the rationales - which differ between the sectors - underlying their advocacy for change.