The Jobs and Skills Summit held at the end of last week was designed to address Australia’s skills shortage and unemployment rate with higher productivity of Australia’s existing workforce and to tailor its migration program to add more workers in industries and occupations in demand.

The second day of the summit concentrated on immigration-related outcomes and where policies could have an immediate and future impact. Three key outcomes, none of which surprised, were announced by the Minister for Immigration, Citizenship and Multicultural Affairs shortly after.

Increase in permanent migration places to 195,000 from 160,000

Australia’s permanent migration intake for the current program year will increase by 35,000 places to 195,000. While the link in the media release appears to be broken, a comparison of the changes can be made to the old numbers.

The total number of skilled visas will rise from 109,900 to 142,400, an increase of almost 30 per cent. This is compared with an increase of family visas from 50,000 to 52,500, a 5 per cent increase. The difference is obviously because the summit was designed to add to the number of skilled migrants.

Of the increase in skilled visas, these are further broken down into:

• Regional visas: 34,000 places up from 25,000 places, up 42 per cent,

• State/Territory Nominated visas: 31,000 places up from 20,000 places, up 55 per cent.

Just where the other 32,500 extra skilled places will go is not known. Concentrating most of the additional places in the above streams makes sense as regional areas generally have exacerbated unemployment and states and territories can, within the confines of the regulations for the subclass 190 – Skilled Nominated visa and subclass 491 – Skilled Work Regional (Provisional) visa, tailor their nomination criteria to suit their skill needs.

Subclass 485 – Temporary Graduate visas increase by two years for certain degrees

International graduates who have studied certain degrees will see the number of years their subclass 485 – Temporary Graduate visa under the Post Study stream increase by two years depending on what degree qualification they obtain. The Minister for Home Affairs announced that those who complete degrees in “select” fields will obtain the bonus two years. This means for:

• Bachelor degrees – a visa for four years instead of two years,

• Master degrees – a visa for five years instead of three years, and

• Doctoral degrees – a visa for six years instead of four years.

There was no clarification of what specific areas of verified skill shortages will qualify as a select field but considering the industries quoted in the summit and media announcements, it is expected to be nursing, information technology, and education for starters.

With a longer visa, it will enable international graduates to obtain suitable work experience in their profession. For those that wish to become permanent residents, a longer visa may assist them to meet work experience criteria for other visas, which are typically:

• Subclass 482 – Temporary Skill Shortage visa, at least two years of full-time work experience,

• Subclass 186 – Employer Nomination Scheme visa, at least three years of full-time work experience, and

• Subclass 494 – Skilled Employer Sponsored Regional (Provisional) visa, at least three years of full-time work experience.

More resources to address the visa backlog

Lastly, more resources will be provided to work through the visa application backlog. This involves $36.1 million in extra funding to primarily recruit around 500 more visa processing staff over the next nine months. This is in addition to diverting other staff to processing.

According to a recent article there were some 962,000 outstanding non-humanitarian visa applications in May 2022 of which 150,000 were for skilled visas.

There was no announcement of any increase to the Temporary Skilled Migration Income Threshold (TSMIT). This was probably due to the wishes of the organisers of the summit to have agreed upon outcomes. Stakeholders had conflicting opinions on just how much the TSMIT should increase. This does not mean, however, that a change to the TSMIT is not forthcoming.