Submission by the Australian Council of Trade Unions to the Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee
The Migration Amendment (Strengthening Sponsorship and Nomination Processes) Bill 2024 (the bill) would amend the Migration Act 1958 to establish the Skills in Demand Visa, legislate income threshold requirements for skilled workers, and introduce a public register of approved sponsors.
The bill is a critical part of implementing the Government’s Migration Strategy, released in December 2023. The Migration Strategy will be instrumental in repairing the Coalition Government’s legacy of damage and neglect, which has seen rampant migrant worker exploitation and employers gaining the system to use temporary migration as a source of cheap labour.
The ACTU welcomed the important reforms in the Migration Strategy, in particular:
- Introducing for the first time an evidence-based, tripartite approach to skilled migration where Jobs and Skills Australia will advise on labour market shortages based on rigorous analysis of data and evidence from unions and employers to ensure that shortages are genuine – rather than simply claimed by the employer in order to access the skilled migration system;
- Engineering-out exploitation from our migration system, including by replacing the Temporary Skill Shortage (TSS) subclass 482 visa with the new Skills in Demand visa which will enable workers mobility in the labour market and end the bonded nature of the TSS visa which ties workers to a single employer, rendering them heavily dependent on that employer not only for their livelihood but for their ability to stay in the country;
- Measures to end ‘permanent temporariness’ and restore permanency to the heart of our migration program;
- Measures to tackle migrant worker exploitation and strengthen employer compliance, including:
- supporting migrant workers to report exploitation by introducing protections against visa cancellation
- increased penalties for employers who exploit migrant workers
- developing a public register of approved sponsors to enable monitoring and oversight
- legislating the indexation of wage thresholds, to ensure that temporary migrant workers can support themselves in Australia and are less vulnerable to exploitation.
