It never ceases to amaze how the Coalition’s token changes to the ‘skilled’ temporary worker visa system can elicit so much outrage from company heads.
The latest example of this outrage has come from Woodside CEO, Peter Coleman, who claims that the Coalition’s decision to change the 457 visa scheme could prompt other countries to impose similar barriers on Australian workers. From The AFR:
“If you put up barriers here, it will get reciprocated in an absolute heartbeat,” Mr Coleman told delegates at the Australian National University’s Crawford Australian Leadership Forum.
“What you do then is everything you are trying to do under the new Colombo plan and so forth in training Australians, getting them overseas experience and making them worldly in their views suddenly gets closed up because we have this stubborn misconceived view of the world that we were losing jobs here in Australia.”
Mr Coleman said the reality was there were some specialist skills that were just too costly to develop in Australia hence why access to foreign labour was required.
Those workers brought to Australia often became a champion of it, he added.
“We know through our own experience that anyone who gets those early experiences in their career in a particular country have a positive affinity to that country and are more likely to invest there… even when it looks pretty poor from a distance,” he said.
Now let’s reexamine the Turnbull Government’s announced changes to temporary skilled visas:
- Implementing a new two-year temporary visa system that has no path to permanent residency, as well as a four-year scheme for highly skilled positions where there is a proven labour shortage;
- Cutting the range of jobs that foreign workers can apply for by around 200 occupations;
- Mandatory employer-conducted labour market testing for all visas issued under the new scheme; and
- Mandatory English language proficiency.
While the changes sounded significant, they are really just a sham.
First, the appallingly low pay floor of $53,900 (non-indexed) was been retained, which is 35% below the average full-time salary of $82,789 (which includes unskilled workers). Thus, employers will still be incentivised to hire cheap foreign labour over locals, and the temporary skilled visa system will continue to undermine the pay and working conditions of local workers.
Second, the mandatory labour market testing requirements implemented by the Coalition are a sham because they allow employer-conducted testing rather than from an independent body, and can be easily overcome by placing an ad on social media.
Third, the initially proposed changes to the Consolidated Skilled Occupations List (CSOL) were immaterial, since they would have only reduced the use of temporary skilled visas by 8%. Since the, the Coalition has indicated that it would water down the changes to the CSOL, making the reforms even less effective.
That such immaterial changes changes generate so much outrage beggars belief. The permanent migrant intake will remain wide open at around 200,000 people a year (two-thirds of which are ‘skilled’) – far beyond the economy’s needs – and Australia’s temporary immigration system will remain wide open to rorting, with employers like Woodside still free to employ ‘skilled’ foreigners at pay rates that are way below the national average.
With Australian workers’ compensation falling for the first time in recorded history:
Despite decent labour productivity growth:
It’s about time elites like Peter Coleman were given the bird.
