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Dr Maha Selvanathan applied for 438 jobs in Australia before a rural NSW clinic offered her a role as a general practitioner.
It took another three years and $55,000 before she was allowed to start working there.
As the federal government struggles to find politically palatable ways to reduce the number of overseas arrivals, a parliamentary inquiry into skilled migration has exposed the growing challenges Australia faces in retaining foreign talent in crucial fields such as medicine.
Australian Medical Association president Dr Danielle McMullen told the joint standing committee on migration on Friday that some doctors were going homeless while waiting on a complex and lengthy approvals process.
She said highly specialised professionals would be poached by other nations with more streamlined systems, and Australia needed to address its duplicated layers of administration and a lack of support for new arrivals.
Selvanathan, an AMA member who also appeared before the inquiry, told this masthead she began her job hunt in Adelaide after moving from Malaysia in 2011 to be with her husband.
For months, she sat exams, proved her qualifications and demonstrated her English proficiency. Almost two years later, she was granted permanent residency. But she still didn’t have a job, and she had become subject to the 10-year moratorium, which requires migrant doctors to work in areas of high need for a decade.
“I got rejection after rejection, and I got one offer from Armidale,” she says.
Then there were more exams, and the regulator had to give its approval. Plus, the one clinic that had offered her a job was not already classified as being in need.
For six months, the clinic advertised for a doctor to prove it could not get one. Selvanathan waited, barred from working in her field. She uprooted and moved to Sydney, ready to relocate again to Armidale. Her husband followed her there, but he could not get a job in the city of less than 24,000 people for almost eight months because he worked in IT.
Throughout the process, she squirrelled away funds to return to Malaysia so she could keep her clinical skills up to date.
“It was very depressing because I don’t know what my future holds,” she said. “There was always this praying and waiting whether this will go through, ‘will my registration go through, will my supervision go through’. So it was just very upsetting and a lot of money.”
McMullen said more than half of Australia’s GPs were international medical graduates, who prop up rural medical services. They should be celebrated rather than being treated as a “temporary fix for poor workforce planning”, she said.
She pointed to a lack of rural housing as a significant barrier. Logistical challenges were compounded by a “deep-set culture” of racism that meant migrant doctors were often forced out of roles, or lived in fear of speaking up against discrimination because their visa was tied to their employer, she said.
“It is deeply concerning that we’ve got doctors essentially living in even short periods of homelessness. It is not, I think, what the community would expect,” she said.
Liberal MP Leon Rebello, the migration committee’s deputy chair, said the housing challenge was a recurring theme across Friday’s testimony from numerous industries, from law to medicine and science.
“That nexus between housing and immigration is going to be critical going forward,” Rebello said.
“You can’t set migration numbers without giving due consideration to the infrastructure and the housing that Australia could take, and that’s ultimately the key.”
As Prime Minister Anthony Albanese scrambles to get the Coalition onside for laws that will help the government hit a forecast 225,000 net migration target in two years time, Labor premiers have split. NSW Premier Chris Minns said governments needed to stop relying on migration to boost productivity and South Australia’s Peter Malinauskas has framed sweeping cuts as economic self-harm.
Asked about Malinauskas’ comments on Friday, Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles said immigration was crucial to the economy and should not be “kicked around like a political football”.
But in echoes of the opposition, which has vowed to limit annual migration to the number of homes built per year, Marles said: “That said, immigration needs to be pegged at a level which matches our infrastructure, our services.”
Selvanathan did not want to weigh in on the broader political debate but she said she did know Australia needed to retain more doctors.
She said many of her friends had given up on a career in medicine and had retrained in other professions, such as banking.
“Complete wasted skills,” she said.
Brittany Busch is a federal politics reporter for The Age and Sydney Morning Herald.Connect via email.From our partners
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