Australia’s temporary work visa program needs a revamp, and it could benefit Aussie businesses

Australia’s temporary skilled migration program is hard for businesses to use while still not protecting migrants from exploitation.

There is a better way, concludes a new report from the Grattan Institute on fixing temporary skilled migration.

The long-standing practice of restricting temporary sponsorship to occupations classified as “in shortage” should be abandoned. Instead, temporary sponsorship should be reserved for higher-wage jobs in any occupation.

Occupation classifications are inflexible

There are more than 1000 occupations in the Australian and New Zealand Standard Classification of Occupations (ANZSCO).

The government use these classifications of Australia’s 13 million jobs for a range of purposes.

The National Skills Commission (which advises the federal government on workforce skills needed) and the Department of Home Affairs (which oversees visa programs) use them to compile three lists of skills wanted by Australia’s skilled migration schemes. One list is focused on short-term needs, another on longer-term needs and the third on skills needed in regional areas.

Defining needed skills by occupation, however, is an inflexible way to meet shortages in a rapidly changing labour market — and flexibility is the very thing temporary skilled migration programs are meant to provide.

This rigidity is becoming ever more of a problem as more highly skilled service industries develop. New tasks and roles take time to be classified as official occupations. For example, ANZSCO didn’t recognise the developing and in-demand profession of “data scientist” as an occupation until September 2019.

An occupation ‘shortage’ is hard to measure

For occupations that do exist, deciding which are “in shortage” isn’t clear-cut.

For example, the National Skills Commission’s 2021 Skills Priority List defines a “shortage” as:

This is unsound. Wages change over time. Wages for a job where demand is greater than supply will probably increase relative to other jobs. Pegging the definition to “current levels of renumeration” will overstate the roles in which there is a genuine shortage.

But even with a better definition, Australian policy makers would still lack the data — such as timely vacancy and wage data for each of the 1000 occupations — to identify skills shortages in real time.

Without this information it is difficult to see what, beyond input from industry lobby groups, determines which occupations become eligible for temporary sponsorship….Readmore