Unions have criticised a proposed new class of temporary visa, saying it will add to an increasingly fragile and easy-to-manipulate labour market.
The Department of Immigration and Border Protection released a discussion paper last month which contains a proposal for a new short-term mobility visa. The visa would allow highly specialised workers to stay in Australia for up to 12 months without having to apply for a 457 skilled migrant visa.
Unions are upset about the lack of labour market testing in the proposal during a time of high unemployment.
“It is absolute madness in the current environment, with unemployment at a 10-year high, to be removing even more opportunities for people to gain access to the workforce,” Michael O’Connor from the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU) said.
The acting opposition leader, Tony Burke, said: “The response from the federal government to rising unemployment is to not have to check, potentially, whether or not Australians can do a job before you bring in people from overseas.
“At a time of rising unemployment, I find it astonishing if that’s being abandoned.”
The head of the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU), Ged Kearney, said there has been a sharp increase in the number of temporary working visas granted, making exploitation of workers more of a possibility.
“They drive down wages and conditions,” she said. “They add to a fragile and easy-to-manipulate workforce.”
The discussion paper does not specify who would be eligible for the visa. It only states that it would apply to “highly specialised and intermittent work”.
A spokesman for the assistant immigration minister, Michaelia Cash, said the government would not comment on the visa proposal until the consultation phase was finished, but the government’s priority was to ensure any changes to the visa system supplemented Australia’s work force.
The national president of the Migration Institute of Australia, Angela Chan, said the visa would apply only to a small number of people, including company directors and high-level executives who were coming to Australia to set up divisions and subsidiaries, or software developers creating specialised programs for Australian companies.
“Unions are always diametrically opposed to any type of temporary visas, and that is unfortunate,” Chan said, adding that 457 skilled migration visa holders in particular, who make up only 1% of the labour force, often get “picked on”.
“There is a need to have this [new visa] for flexibility to get these things done,” Chan said. “There is a need to meet … the skills in this area for intermittent work.”
She said labour market testing had not worked in the past.
“Placing an ad [for a job] has often just been another bureaucratic step,” Chan said.
But she acknowledged it would be better to fill the skills gap with Australian workers.
Like Kearney, she said training and improving the skills of the Australian workforce was the way to lower the high unemployment rate.
A spokesman for the Business Council of Australia said it would comment only when it had made a submission on the proposal.
Submissions on the discussion paper into Australia’s skilled migration system can be made until the end of this month.
