Many foreign workers coming to Australia for skilled jobs will be restricted to a two-year visa, a “significant restriction” on access to the new temporary skilled visa, the business chamber has said.
The Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry’s acting chief executive, Jenny Lambert, has dismissed concerns that few workers hold jobs in the categories eliminated from the program entirely, arguing that “the totality of the changes” restricts the program more extensively.
An analysis by Guardian Australia shows that many routine jobs still classified as skilled will be restricted to a two-year visa, instead of the current four, and will not be eligible for permanent residency. These include cooks, restaurant and hospitality managers, event organisers, farmers and many IT jobs.
The replacement of the 457 visa system with two streams of temporary skilled visas for four or two years, announced on Tuesday, was accompanied with the removal of more than 200 job categories from eligibility for the scheme.
On Monday Labor raised concerns that only 8.6% of current 457 visa-holders work in occupations excluded by the government proposals.
Bill Shorten said Labor’s analysis showed the proposal was a “con job” because in reality most of the categories eliminated “have not been used for 10 years” to bring in foreign workers.
“This is a guy [Malcolm Turnbull] who will be tough on antique dealers and deer farmers but he will still allow nurses to come in from overseas,” he said. “The fact of the matter is that for bakers and builders, for cooks, for nurses, for mechanics, that they can still come in from overseas. These jobs should be going to Australians.”
Lambert said it was unsurprising the number of people working jobs in eliminated categories was so small because the government had removed categories that “created an impression of high use [to bring in foreign workers] but were in fact low use”.
“You need to look at the totality of the changes. There will be quite significant restrictions on accessing the scheme.”
The other changes, including stricter requirements for criminal record checks, higher English standards and compulsory labour market testing for all occupations would be “far more profound”, she said.
Lambert said the other major change is that the 457 visa is available for four years but the number of occupations that qualify for the four-year visa is “significantly less” than for 457s.
The immigration department has published a consolidated list of jobs that are eligible for temporary work visas and the medium-term list of jobs eligible only for the four-year visa.
There are 435 jobs on the full list and 187 on the medium-term list, meaning that 248 job categories will only be eligible for the shorter two-year visa.
A comparison of the two lists reveals that jobs eligible only for the shorter stay include bakers, cooks, accommodation and hospitality managers, cafe or restaurant managers, event organisers, facilities managers, farmers, flower or fruit growers, hairdressers, many IT jobs, and massage therapists.
Many of the jobs in the two-year category are subject to further caveats, for example that restaurant managers do not include fast food restaurants.
“The four year visa is a higher skill list [than the two-year list] and is more limited,” Lambert said. “If you’re doing a direct comparison with the 457 scheme, the significant issue is not the 200 occupations taken off the two-year list, it’s the extras taken off the four-year list.”
Lambert said the relegation of some jobs to the two-year category “may create some challenges for business”. Nevertheless, she said ACCI supported the temporary skilled work visa changes potential to rebuild confidence in the system and ensure it was “a targeted program” for specific skills.
Workers on the two-year temporary visa can apply to extend for a further two years but, as the immigration minister, Peter Dutton, noted on Tuesday, are not able to apply for permanent residency, in effect closing off a pathway to citizenship.
The Group of Eight universities has written to Turnbull outlining a number of criticisms of the visa changes, including that university lecturers and tutors were included on the shorter two-year list with “no permanent residency pathway”.
The letter from its chief executive, Vicki Thomson, also complained that categories relevant to university research including archaeologist, biologist and petroleum engineer had been removed entirely.
On Wednesday Turnbull said the changes to the 457 visa program were the start of adjustments to the migration and citizenship program that would put “Australian jobs and Australian values first”.
Dutton said that when Labor was in office a total of 21,000 visas were given out under the categories that had been eliminated, rebutting Shorten’s claim they were not widely used.
The Greens’ employment spokesman, Adam Bandt, said his party was concerned the government was using the skilled visa changes as “a forerunner to a broader range of changes around citizenship”.
He said changes to 457s to close off pathways to citizenship had “nothing to do with protecting labour standards and everything to do with trying to reset the debate in a Trumpian way ... by [beating] the nationalism drum”.
