“Everyone who knows anything about immigration,including unions,recognises that labor market testing is just a charade,” he said.
“It involves an enormous amount of delay because employers have to go through a bureaucratic set of advertising processes,not necessarily the normal advertising processes,but advertising processes as defined by the government.
“The government getting involved in telling an employer they’re right or wrong when they try to recruit someone from overseas has never worked.”
O’Neil last month flagged problems with the rules,saying the nation had a “labour market testing process that in some cases is little more than a box-ticking exercise that wastes time and energy”.
She cited the case of Nobel-prize winning astrophysicist Brian Schmidt,nowvice-chancellor of the Australian National University,who secured a visa to Australia in justfour days when he and his wife came to Australia in 1994. An astrophysicist today has to wait an average of 178 days to receive a skilled visa to Australia.
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After being abolished by the Coalition in 2001,labour market testing was reintroduced by the Labor government in 2013 and then expanded by the Coalition in 2018.
Australian Council of Trade unions president Michele O’Neil said any changes must include an assessment of skill shortages that was “rigorous,adaptable and reflective of actual labour market demands compared with the current model”.
“Our current migration system is broken – the system needs a complete overhaul to ensure it is integrated with domestic skills development and workforce planning,while addressing migrant worker exploitation and rebalancing our system toward permanent migration,” she said.
The review is also expected to urge the government to change the way it develops the skilled migration lists that determine workforce needs. They are largely seen as outdated and not fit-for-purpose in attracting workers in high-tech industries.
It will also seek to tackle the explosion of temporary visas to nearly 2 million a year,double what it was 15 years ago.
Skilled migrants comprise just 6 per cent of the nation’s overall temporary program.
Mary Anne Kenny,associate professor of law at Murdoch University and a lawyer who works on migration issues,said the system had become “incredibly complicated”.
Kenny said she hoped the review would provide clearer pathways from temporary to permanent migration and from permanent visas to citizenship.
“Simpler processes in order to attract the best migrants we can and to be competitive would be a really positive thing coming out of the review,” she said.
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“Temporary migration can be beneficial,but there has to be an opportunity for some way of being able to make it permanent.”
Refugee policy won’t be a subject of the review to be handed down this week,but Kenny said she would like to see Labor follow through on its commitment to raise the annual humanitarian intake to 27,000.