A leading Australian business figure says the country urgently needs more skilled migrants and immigration should be boosted to allow that to happen.

The national population has trebled in the last 70 years, with Australia’s population now at 25.5 million.

An opinion piece in the Australian Financial Review this week is calling for another tripling in the next 70 years, to bring the population to 75 million.

Tony Shepherd, director of Snowy Hydro, chair of EnviroPacific and chairman of Greater Western Sydney football club, says it’s tricky to forecast the ideal population size so many years in advance but more migration is needed.

“We desperately need to increase skilled immigration to Australia. We are desperately short of engineers, tradespeople … all of those things we need to make our economy stronger,” he told Tom Elliott.

“We have these massive infrastructure programs and we can’t even get engineers and tradespeople to work on them.

“It’s actually holding our economy back.”

Mr Shepherd proposed granting additional new visas on the condition that recipients must live outside major Australian cities.

“We need to spread it around,” he said.

“We cant have every immigrant coming to Australia living in the western and eastern suburbs of Melbourne and Sydney.”

Press PLAY below to hear what Tony Shepherd thinks should happen

 Image: Matt King/Getty Images