Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations, Tony Abbott, has called for comment from industry groups on the matter. This follows the reduction earlier this year of the number of ICT specialisations on the National Skill Shortage List identified as -in shortage" have halved to just 12 of the almost 100 specialisations surveyed.
-We will then send those comments, the survey and the reduced [National Skill Shortage] list to the department of immigration and they'll make an assessment based on their beliefs," a spokesperson for the minister Simone Holzapfel told ZDNet Australia. She was unable to give an exact time frame, but said she expected this to happen in "about a month".
The Department for Immigration will then review the Migration Occupations in Demand List (MODL). This is used to target Australia's skilled migration to people who have skills that are in demand, by giving those skills extra points in the eligibility test.
Steve Ingram, spokesperson for Immigration Minister Philip Ruddock, said the new scheme was unlikely to affect the level of immigrants in the near future. -We have far more demand for skilled migration than places. There has been a drop in demand for temporary residence for skilled migration, and we see responses to that far more quickly than for permanent migration."
The definition of “skill shortage” as it is perceived by an average Australian employer is not the same as the one used by the Government. Apparently, despite fascistic and in some cases, just highway robbery approach of Phillip Ruddock to other migrant categories (eg. aged parents), he is still more civilized with regard to skilled migration than the general public is.
Indeed, there is a significant shortage of really skilled professionals in about every high tech area, not only in IT, and the higher the “tech” the greater the shortage.
But what is really sought by the employers is a (white) skilled AUSSIE and “someone (whose family) we know”, not simply a “skilled” someone from overseas. It is an unspoken but clearly defined goal of every Australian manager, even when he/she learnt to hide this thought under pretence of necessity of having a “local experience”. The migrants skilled or not, are thought of in about the same fashion as Americans thought of African blacks not so long ago: here are your cotton fields and 5 cents a day (in modern currency), but everything we regard as “intellectual” and fairly paid work is not for you “.
Real life signs of such attitudes are interviews with no technical questions asked and plainly expressed provincial snobbery of a panel. If the migrant (apparently by oversight or under pressure, as in Public Service) still gets his/her position, it is thought as a temporary replacement for someone “right” for the place and is never paid properly. This is a whole culture, where employers by unspoken & by default understood agreement, never pay migrants at the rate they pay to “real” Ausies – simply to keep the “wogs” where they should be – that is, at the bottom of social ladder.
If this government wants immigration to really contribute to Australian economy, it should increase unskilled category migration. Unskilled, uneducated, lowly, humble, doing dirty work - that is what is expected by the public from people speaking with a “non-strine” accent. True, it won’t help Australia to become a world leader in technological sense, but with the attitudes like that it will not happen anyway.