Engineering Recruitment, Engineers Recruitment, Engineering Employment, Engineering Professionals, Engineering Jobs, WA, Australia

21 July 2011

Immigration Minister Chris Bowen recently announced Perth’s addition to the Regional Sponsored Migration Scheme at a conference in the West Australian capital. Its listing as a ‘regional employment hardship area’ means business will have special access to the scheme’s annual national pool of 16,000 sponsored visa places for foreign workers. The state government has, for a long time, loudly lobbied the federal government to include Perth in the scheme in a bid to help fill a forecast shortage of 33,000 workers in the next 18 months and more than 150,000 by 2017. The WA government also wants further changes to the nation’s visa system, including expanding the use of working holiday visas. Mr Bowen said Perth employers, whether in the resources, construction, restaurant or other sectors, could now apply to take workers already in Australia under the sponsored 457 visa programme or to import skilled workers from overseas. Despite unions in WA attacking the move as “letting employers off the hook” by not employing local workers, industry groups welcomed the move.

Excerpt from: The Australian Financial Review (http://afr.com), 20 July 2011.