Australia PM Malcolm Turnbull
Photo by: Bloomberg
PERTH (miningweekly.com) – The Queensland Resources Council (QRC) has welcomed the scrapping of the 457 visa by Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, saying that the natural resource sector was no longer a significant employer of these visa holders.
Turnbull on Tuesday announced the abolishment of the 457 visa for foreign workers, and the creation of a new temporary visa restricted to critical skills.
Turnbull said that this would ensure Australian workers were given the absolute first priority for jobs, while businesses would be able to temporarily access the critical skills they need to grow if skilled Australian workers were not available.
The subclass 457 visa will be abolished and replaced with the temporary skill shortage visa, which will include mandatory criminal checks and tighter English language requirements.
The new visa programme will comprise two streams – short term and medium term – and will be underpinned by more focused occupation lists that are responsive to genuine skill needs and regional variations across Australia.
Short term visas will be issued for two years, while medium term visas will be issued only in the case of more critical skills shortages and for up to four years.
Both streams will include mandatory labour market testing with limited exemptions; a new nondiscriminatory workforce test; mandatory criminal history checks; a market salary rate assessment and a new two-year work experience requirement.
Additionally there will be tightened English language requirements for the medium term stream.
The new visa will also include a strengthened training obligation for employers sponsoring foreign skilled workers to provide enhanced training outcomes for Australians in high-need industries and occupations.
“These changes will give Australian job seekers more opportunity to find work while finding the right balance so businesses can prosper by acquiring the expertise they need,” the Prime Minister said.
QRC CEO Ian Macfarlane welcomed the announcement, pointing out that the current visa holders employed by the resources sector possess highly specialised skills and experience.
The Australian Mines and Metals Association (Amma) said that the replacement of the 457 visa programme would help ensure skilled migrants were no longer trivialised and leveraged for cheap political point-scoring.
“The resource industry is one sector that has seen a dramatic change in labour demand and skills availability in recent years.
“The same temporary skilled migration programmes that were critical to filling crippling skills shortages during the major project investment and construction boom, have more recently seen numbers drop to almost nonexistent, as skills and labour pressures have eased,” Amma said in a statement.
Department of Immigration figures show the resource industry as making 6 630 applications for 457 visas in 2011/12, falling to 2 600 in 2013/14 and just 230 in 2016/17.
The total number of 457 visas given to workers in the mining industry in 2015/16 was a quarter of that of industries within health services and a fraction of the hospitality industry.