Slashdot Mirror
Australian PM Targets Imported IT Workers
beaverdownunder writes "A debate 'down under' has started to rage surrounding the importation of 'temporary' IT workers on so-called 457 visas, with the Prime Minister promising to bring in tough new restrictions on foreign workers in a pre-election pledge, despite evidence that there are insufficient numbers of Australians to fill the skills gap. Some quarters argue the foreign workers are necessary to drive growth in Australia's IT industry, while others have cited examples where large Australian companies have imported workers needlessly, displacing qualified Aussie personnel."
And how is this different from the controversy over this exact same subject here in the US, and I'm sure in other countries too?
When you teach your kids to be Tradies.
Deal with it.
This is just a ploy by a desperate PM way behind in the polls and facing a wipeout in the upcoming federal election. She's trying to gain some mileage by playing on the fears of Australians, who are suspicious of imported temporary workers. It doesn't matter whether there is a skill shortage or not, the public doesn't actually get the real facts...
same thing for canada
Whether or not there is a shortage of native IT workers in Australia, companies could potentially switch to off shoring the jobs if the government prevents importing of workers.
"Panic set in when studies showed over 70% of youngsters thought Sheilas were filipina IT chicks."
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Well, this is going to be an extra-large shit for us, where me spending 2 years in Norway at head office was significantly easier than bringing people over here for 6 months at a time for skills exchange. HR tells me that Australia is the hardest country in the world they've tried to give people "bridge the world" temporary transfers to. Insular much?
It's different because the aussie leadership actually recognize it as a problem. In the US it's just business as usual.
You need to actually live here to understand the politics of the situation. The problem is that the government has lost control of illegal immigration (purely their fault, because they're the ones who dismantled a border-control regime that worked), so in order to signal to the electorate that they're very very very concerned about illegal immigration, they're... cracking down on legal immigration.
People on 457 visas have average annual incomes safely over ~$90k, which makes sense - the 457 program is targeted at areas of skills shortage. There is no comparison with the H1B visas in the US.
The problem is not a shortage of engineers. The problem is that software companies don't want to pay competitive salaries. Were salaries higher, that would attract capable workers into the software field such as engineers or physicists. It would also further increase the number and quality of students studying computer science.
There's a reason interest in software development work peaked in the late 1990s. That was also when salary increases peaked.
1) you call for "Globalization"
2) you bomb a random country somewhere in asia
3) you complain you have immigrants
They get everywhere! Did you hear, even some government jobs are taken by them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_Gillard
Oh, the irony.
Australia already has plenty to sell
Australia is getting very wealthy selling raw materials such as iron ore, gold, natural gas, and so on
They don't need IT workers
They are rich enough to outsource all the IT works to India or Indonesia
If you are growing GDP just by importing workers you're often not growing GDP per capita. Which means you're not actually making the country's people richer on average.
It is of course usually harder to grow GDP by increasing productivity per person.
Expect plenty of this type of protectionist nonsense from every government, distorting the markets, raising prices by removing competition because of varios lobbying efforts and just stupid populist sentiment designed to rally up nationalistic feelings. Trade wars follow currency wars and lead to hot wars. In the interim they lead to higher prices (wage is also a price) thus to higher unemployment and more outsourcing. More unemployment fuels the negative popular sentiment, worsens the economy and feeds this self-perpetuating cycle, which gives politicians more ammunition to destroy freedoms (and this legislature is destroying ppls freedoms) and this brings closer the inevitable conflict. All such measures end up hurting the economy but politicians get more power and preferred lobbying companies get to raise prices in and steal from the market by joining the political power.
Be aware of this, don't fall into a trap believing this is good for you or the economy, it's not. It hurts the economy and thus it hurts you.
You can't handle the truth.
I disagree, I think software companies would love to pay a competitive salary, as long as ALL of their competitors are paying it too. Your problem is that your competition is now international, and Australia has a very high cost of living. In the late 1990's the internet hadn't properly taken hold in CEO's brains so your competition for software was still mostly domestic (international companies like Microsoft, IBM, etc were the exception).
Politicians don't seem to get is whilst high tech jobs are the future, they're not subject to the same geographical constraints that low tech jobs like farming are. Why would a company want to pay an Australian developer a high rate of pay when he can pay an Indian developer a lower wage and the Indian guy gets to live in the lap of luxury? Why would a company or consumer want to buy software developed in Australia, when Indian, American or European software can be bought cheaper over the net? (Region locks have plusses and minuses in this case)
The causes of the high cost of living needs to be tackled, but this is probably going to involve low-skilled immigration and they've sealed that exit off.
It is unbelievable that a concept of jobs "belonging" to anyone (natives or whomever) still exists in 21st century. Free market rules :)
...and not all you other imigrants?
You do realize that any reasonably non-crap programmer ALREADY basically competes with you no matter what country you live in. I know "out of sight out of mind" but programmers don't just disappear because they live in a different country, and the market is pretty well globalized. So you can either let programmers create jobs in another country or contribute to your own economy.
My other UID is three digits.
It's different because:
1. Slashdot is reporting on a political topic that isn't US-centric. That's different enough on it's own to be celebrating.
2. And because it means we get to enjoy that crocodile-tooth hat icon. I mean... who wouldn't want to see more of that?
Anyone in the IT industry in Oz who has not seen 457 visa abuse, especially by the large system integrators, is simply not paying attention. Bringing in dirt cheap labor who are on-sold to customers at a very high profit margin is rife. Some of these people are good, some are bad. But all are basically being used to reduce IT wages and increase the profit margins of the SI's.
Here's a question: if there is an IT skills shortage, why have IT wages been flat for five years.
And the opposition trying to play this as racism is beyond offensive, given their demonization and wolf-whistling around refugees. I'd like to think Abbott couldn't go lower, but I am pretty sure there are much further depths of depravity and hypocrisy that man and his supporter are capable of.
Plus their fans in News Ltd (aka. News Corp elsewhere).
As a teenager, we were encouraged to study engineering and computing. IT jobs were sold to us as genuine careers. So we spent our four plus years at uni only to find that outsourcing is the new black, and all our study is for naught. Thanks.
Has been here on a 457 until he got his temp. visa. And honestly, he's amazing at his job. One of the best people I have ever worked with. I wouldn't want anyone else. (I'm an Aussie)
Just tour the IT areas of federal departments (as Gillard has) that don't require a security clearance (and thus citizenship) and plenty of foreign workers are there. When I worked for DEEWR my whole team except for me was Indian. On the national day of India they had morning tea and there were next to no bums on seats - they were all in the kitchen eating cake. Now this isn't a comment aimed at Indians who just want to earn money for themselves and families (nothing wrong with that - I would do the same), but for Gillard to say private companies are abusing the system and ignore how federal government and state government is happy to abuse the visa system and decrease local IT workers wages is disgusting. Given IT doesn't have a union to lean on the government no doubt nothing will be done, unlike construction and other union industries where Labor drop their pants and bend over and take it to make sure they have union members votes. Labor - happy to play the class war card, race war card and any other FUD card to stay in power. Are they going to lose the next election? You bet. Will they salt the earth and leave destruction on the way out? You bet.
Just like the BS about US corporations whining they desperately need more H1B visas, this is about increasing profits by replacing living wage jobs with the modern IT equivalent of indebtured servants; compliant, desperate folks willing to work way too hard for pennies on the pound / dollar. And if they ask for a raise or complain about 60-hour work weeks? DEPORTED.
There are plenty of IT workers in Australia. I know because im one of them. The companies just don't like paying the wages. They've already offshored all the jobs they can. Now they want to import low paid workers to do the work that can't be sent OS. Even if the PM is being populist that doesn't mean it's not true.
not that I'm disagreeing with you, but I'd like to see a fact-based discussion.
Will she be similarly defensive against the wholesale offshoring of IT jobs FROM Australia to China/India?
Okay, I've been on both sides of this as I've been to Australia three different times for work (but not with the visa they talk about). When I was brought in I was brought in because they had fewer than 10 people in the entire country that were certified to do what I was doing at the time (there were only a few hundred total worldwide). There well and truly was a shortage of the skills they were looking for and they could not have possibly met that need in country.
Cases like mine are the exception though, and most visas issued for workers to come in and perform IT work are issued to avoid hiring native workers. Someone who is working on a visa is much more likely to be able to be pressed to work additional free hours, won't have costs like retirement and is really easy to get rid of if you don't want them anymore. In short they are viewed as disposable workers that do more at less cost.
There is a relatively easy and balanced fix for these problems (it's a problem when large quantities of natives can't get work and your importing people to work). If you really want to measure if there is actually a shortage of workers for a given field all you have to do is monitor average pay and benefits for native workers. If there is a genuine shortage you will see pay and benefits rise accordingly (market dynamics). When average pay and benefits rise to a certain level you allow for more visas to be issued. This avoids a hard cap while allowing for genuine shortages to be addressed without decimating native workers careers.
I also think you should allow people who come in like this to stay for a limited number of years with a fast track for citizenship. If they don't obtain their citizenship after X years they return home. /Loved Australia
this happens everywhere, get over it, you're worth the money you're worth, if you cant get a job at the wage you think you are worth, chances are you arent worth it. I see this all the time with pile of shit programmers who talk the talk but walk like they're tied to a chair. Migrant workers are everywhere, they are just another factor in the job market. You moan about them taking *your* jobs, but there are plenty of Australian (and US) workers overseas therefore, they are leaving space behind them and they're taking jobs elsewhere, where I imagine a bunch of inadequate twats are moaning about them.
well CS is not IT so you start out with a skills gaps.
also tech schools and learn on the job are liked by real IT pros but not are not liked by HR.
The outsourcing firms cheat to make there people look better on paper and when things get messed up they may try to hide it under language barriers or say we foiled your specs to the letter (that works poorly)
It's different inasmuch as Labor is in a hole WRT the slowly approaching election and are trying to win back blue collar voters that they have been sneering at for years by pushing an issue that is completely irrelevant to those same blue collar voters. I just can't figure out if Gillard actually thinks that flushing Labor's moral high ground on immigration is a good idea or if she's just trying to stick the knife into whoever takes over after she is dumped as leader. At least the second option would show some imagination; knifing someone in the back when you don't even know who it is is actually pretty impressive.
"Cursed is he who rises early in the morning..." Isiah 5:11
AU Immigrants in the IT field are mostly from Europe, particularly the UK. They are selling their homes and taking at least 450,000AUD with them. That's a nice sum coming directly into the country for almost no effort.
Want more IT workers? Then stop shitting all over them with your attempts to censor the internet and the like.
I'm an Australian IT worker and that's a good part of why I left the country.
And how is this different from the controversy over this exact same subject here in the US
Well, in Australia the Prime Minister is actually OPPOSING visas that cut native IT workers out of work (and artificially lower wages). In the U.S, by contrast, the President is falling all over himself to say how great they are, and ask for even more.
Your political party doesn't care about your rights and only represents corporate interests.
So you can either let programmers create jobs in another country or contribute to your own economy.
But it's not just to the economy that they contribute. They also contribute to the reduction of the culture (by bringing in their own, different culture). Increased immigration is usually associated with increased crime and reduction of social trust. With enough immigration, the host country's infrastructure is deteriorated faster.
It's easy to see the amount paid in a salary to an immigrant. It's far harder to quantify the non-economic impacts, or even the economic impacts that are diffused throughout the entire region. But those non-economic costs ARE there, and they are borne by the citizens of the country.
Hey look. Some bogan piece of shit discovered Slashdot. Or more likely they are burgalarizing someone's house and discovered a computer logged on and typed their xenophobic racist always-drunk where-is-my-welfare dumbarse shit. Anyways to educate this dope:
457 are legal visas, you dumbarse. They were introduced by the Liberal Party when they were in power so employers would have access to skilled overseas workers. Yes, there were Aussies with IT skills who were wrongly passed over and now unemployed because of this, but the 457s are legal legitimate visas. Nothing 'illegal immigration' about them at all, you dumbarse
Labor's PM Julia Gillard is extremely unpopular, and she is trying to whip up a racist frenzy to get votes. That is the sort of person she is. Since the 457s were introduced by the Liberals this is a nice two for the price of one. But did I mention her own press secretary is a scotsman she hired on a 457 visa? What a fucking hypocrite.
And as for illegal immigration you are probably getting that confused with refugees. It is perfectly legal to be a refugee, turn up at a country and ask for refuge. That's why they call them refugees. Nothing illegal about that either.
The good news is being stupid isn't illegal either, so that lets you off the hook as well.
So anyway my dumbarse your-mamma-must-have-drunk-while-she-was-carrying-you dope, learn to fucking read a bit before you let your shit for brains tell you what to say or type. Durrr hurrr derrr. read moar: http://theaustralian.com/ http://theage.com/ http://crikey.com/
I've always wondered, you hire someone from a foreign country. To work in a secure low cost situation for a contractor of our government. And then complain over "security"? Who trained them, what doors did you open, what accesses did you grant? and you complain when soomething is stolen?
i'm not "smart" but I ain't born yesterday.
There's been several studies that demonstrate that IBM has been ignoring local labor (something that's illegal) in preference to H1B Visa holders.
Then paying the H1B employees at the lowest end of the lowest technical scale they can cite. And yes, this does depress wages for local labor.
I can only assume the same things are happening in Australia. However, except for xenophobia, it's a non-starter. The Corporate Powers That Be are trying to get the standards lowered, not raised. America is having a hard enough time maintaining the (often ignored) rules about our H1B hiring practices.
Damnit. I was hoping to move to Australia one day, and I'm an IT worker. Maybe New Zealand will still have me.
I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do.
And how is this different from the controversy over this exact same subject here in the US, and I'm sure in other countries too?
There were 4500 Australian IT undergraduate student completions in 2011, and 5800 visas.
Perhaps if they'd had 10,300 Australian IT undergraduate completions, they would have had 0 visas.
Just because you have 10,300 Australians out of work and 10,300 IT jobs open doesn't mean that you can employ those out of work people as IT workers if only 4500 of them were qualified to do IT work.
This is just politics as usual.
In each case, businesses want a captive worker - ideally a slave - and contract workers like this are the means for accomplishing that goal.
How about making it so that nobody legally allowed to work can be forced to a particular work arrangement(e.g. can't be forced to be a contractor unless you really want to be one)?
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
What's a "bogan"?
Will she be similarly defensive against the wholesale offshoring of IT jobs FROM Australia to China/India?
How do you propose she or any other PM does this? A lot of outsourcing outfits are independent Indian companies which are paid by overseas companies to fulfil a contract. You'd have to stop or make more expensive the Australian companies doing business this way, and aside from the issues this would cause with free trade agreements it would be damn ticklish to define.
Undergrads are all well and good, but count for little unless you're a programmer or working for an American company (who seem to worship uni degrees with a fervor seldom seen outside a Nashville Music Festival).
It's quite easy to achieve a good career in infrastructure with industry certs, experience, and a solid grounding in common sense. A smattering of analytical ability won't hurt either.
it means we get to enjoy that crocodile-tooth hat icon
To each his own mate (that's Australian right? I saw it on a Foster's commercial), but I'd rather see the next Elle MacPherson. Come to think of it, even at 48 the old one is looking pretty good.
Whenever I hear people whining about a "skills shortage" I call bullshit. There's no "skills shortage", there's a "people who will work for low wages" shortage. If companies wanted to hire domestic workers, they could, they just don't want to. They love it when supply-and-demand benefits them, but when the workers try to do the same thing (salaries go up when the demand for the skills goes up), well, we can't have that, can we. Those executives might have to forgo that second vacation home or have to settle for a BMW instead of a Bentley.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
You do realize that any reasonably non-crap programmer ALREADY basically competes with you no matter what country you live in.
Only to a limited extent. There are still plenty of reasons to want employees who are local, or at least national. Otherwise there would be no IT people employed in Australia or the US at anything other than poverty wages. And if we truly lived in a globalized world, the same would be true of everyone from doctors to carpenters. Generally I'm staying out of the 457 visa debate because as an American I don't understand enough about the politics and the situation, but the principle I described is widely applicable.
The reality is that they do belong to citizens - just that you've not seen the damage. That said, the best interests are automatically to serve the citizens, not sell them down the river like what you're advocating. Nationalism is alive and well in the 21st Century, and it does poorly to drop it for transnationalism.
Diplomacy won't help you if you're not willing to back it up with a well-armed and well-protected populace.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Because we have a welfare program that qualified IT workers will use if foreign workers are taking local jobs. This means more taxes will be spent to give these people something to live on. I understand getting unemployment in the US is more difficult.
is this where they hide the dingo and the youngest is sent on a quest to find it?
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Programmers don't create jobs, they take them.
Labor "flushed" their "high ground" on immigration (and, indeed, pretty much everything else) a decade ago chasing LNP votes.
Since the early 2000s, Labor has been little more than the Liberals with a 5-year time delay.
If you want a soft-left party in Australia (ie: Labor's traditional position), your only option is the Greens.
Labor's moral high ground? You've got to be kidding me! They lost that when Beazley (from memory) voted with the coalition after Tampa.
Discalimer. I vote Labor more often than Liberal, and the current lot make Whitlam's lot look astute.
3 reasons.
1: The only way to keep a debt ponzi going is to get new suckers to sign up, hence immigrants, illegal or otherwise. Why else do you think they'd go along with Hose' taking out a $400,000 loan on a house while packaging boxes in a warehouse. I shouldn't need to tell you that after the rich people's money is all loaned out and basically gone, they come after yours by ramping commodities like food and gas($4 a gallon anyone?), and once that gets to the point where a certain percentage of the population can't eat and get to work (See Egypt, Greece and Libia for some recent examples), you get an economic crash.
Here's some propaganda used to cover the above fact if you want to see the media monopoly daintily leading the pack of rats off the cliff:
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/03/14/census-record-1-in-3-us-counties-are-now-dying/
2: Interest = Margin + Inflation + Risk.
Government has had an insanely inflationary policy which compresses margin until ya gotta eat, and once you're there, you increase risk. This shows up as executives asset stripping companies and employee's wholesale, just because they can. So what you do is you work your IT people to the bone, threaten them with replacing them with foreign labor, and when they fail to upgrade their education or if they ask for too much, you throw their career into a tailspin since they haven't had time to upgrade their education since you've been working them to the bone.
Need the math?
Here's the numbers for those of you who mistakenly believe silly things like GDP has been positive for the last 30 years in the USA: http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=218741
Outsourcing doesn't fix penny-wise pound-foolish behavior, it only exasperates it, as does screwing with your labor who may decide at 9PM after the Nth 60 hr week, to logic bomb your ass with an epic mistake you won't be able to figure out the cause of.
3: Australia is in the same mess the US is in, however, it's a smaller country, and that means there's less people to play off of each other.
That's not on a 457 visa though ... generally if you bring enough money you can immigrate anywhere.
It applies to some doctors, actually, and accountants.
I suppose whether the Greens are soft left or, as I would call them, hard left, is a matter of where you're standing. However, Bob Brown's commitment to regulation of the media is hardly the sort of stuff I expect out of a center/left party. It's more a hard right/hard left kind of idea.
"Cursed is he who rises early in the morning..." Isiah 5:11
He was on TV as a corporate expert on what we could do to deal with the remarkable rate of job losses at the peak of the Recession. His ingenious solution was to increase H1B visas. That's just the mentality of the people in power and the people with access to their ear holes.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Which doctors? To practice in the US you have to do a residency in the US or Canada. The fact that there are so many foreign born/educated doctors is the US is because being a doctor here is so lucrative that some are willing to overcome that ridiculous barrier to entry. I guess it's necessary because in places like Europe and Japan they still bleed people and don't wash their hands after dissecting corpses. Or so the AMA would have you believe. There is no equivalent barrier for IT or most engineering.
Stay in your own country, job robber. We all know India's goal is not only job robs, but in fact, permanent reverse colonization and takeover of white countries. You deem this "payback" for Britain's supposed colonization of India 200 years ago. Well you've been brainwashed in your schools. India is poor because of 60 years of communism, which failed, as it has everywhere, not because of evil whitey. We all know jobs can't go overseas because 1) Indians don't have the skills, and 2) India doesn't have the mass infrastructure to communicate with the west, 3) all the projects sent to India die, and 4) without sitting next to westerners who teach you how to do the job, you always fail.
Besides, even the global elites are waking up to the fact that Hindoo job-robbers are the cause of the world economic crisis. Just take a look at the record:
Companies ruined or almost ruined by imported Indian labor
Adaptec - Indian CEO Subramanian Sundaresh fired.
AIG (signed outsourcing deal in 2007 in Europe with Accenture Indian frauds, collapsed in 2009)
AirBus (Qantas plane plunged 650 feet injuring passengers when its computer system written by India disengaged the auto-pilot).
Apple - R&D CLOSED in India in 2006.
Australia's National Australia Bank (Outsourced jobs to India in 2007, nationwide ATM and account failure in late 2010).
Bell Labs (Arun Netravalli took over, closed, turned into a shopping mall)
Boeing Dreamliner ES software (written by HCL, banned by FAA)
Bristol-Myers-Squibb (Trade Secrets and documents stolen in U.S. by Indian national guest worker)
Caymas - Startup run by Indian CEO, French director of dev, Chinese tech lead. Closed after 5 years of sucking VC out of America.
Caterpillar misses earnings a mere 4 months after outsourcing to India, Inc.
Circuit City - Outsourced all IT to Indian-run IBM and went bankrupt shortly thereafter.
ComAir crew system run by 100% Indian IT workers caused the 12/25/05 U.S. airport shutdown when they used a short int instead of a long int
Computer Associates - Former CEO Sanjay Kumar, an Indian national, sentenced to 12 years in federal prison for accounting fraud.
Deloitte - 2010 - this Indian-packed consulting company is being sued under RICO fraud charges by Marin Country, California for a failed solution.
Dell - call center (closed in India)
Delta call centers (closed in India)
Fannie Mae - Hired large numbers of Indians, had to be bailed out. Indian logic bomb creator found guilty and sent to prison.
GM - Was booming in 2006, signed $300 million outsourcing deal with Wipro that same year, went bankrupt 3 years later
HP - Got out of the PC hardware business in 2011 and can't compete with Apple's tablets. HP was taken over by Indians and Chinese in 2001. So much for 'Asian' talent!
HSBC ATMs (software taken over by Indians, failed in 2006)
Intel Whitefield processor project (cancelled, Indian staff canned)
JetStar Airways computer failure brings down Christchurch airport on 9/17/11. JetStar is owned by Quantas - which is know to have outsourced to India, Inc.
Lehman (Spectramind software bought by Wipro, ruined, trashed by Indian programmers)
Medicare - Defrauded by Indian national doctor Arun Sharma & wife in the U.S.
Microsoft - Employs over 35,000 H-1Bs. Stock used to be $100. Today it's lucky to be over $25. Not to mention that Vista thing.
MIT Media Lab Asia (canceled)
MyNines - A startup founded and run by Indian national Apar Kothari went belly up after throwing millions of America's VC $ down the drain.
PeopleSoft (Taken over by Indians in 2000, collapsed).
PepsiCo - Slides from #1 to #3 during Indian CEO Indra Nooyi' watch.
Polycom - Former senior executive Sunil Bhalla charged with insider trading.
Qantas - See AirBus above
Quark (Alukah Kamar CEO, fired, lost 60% of its customers to Adobe because Indian-written QuarkExpress 6 was a failure)
Rolls Royce (Sent aircraft engine work to India in 2006, engines delayed for Boeing 787, and failed on at l
And if you were creating jobs in another country there would be an Apple in India by now. And if you had been contributing to other countries over the past 15 years those economies would be booming, not failing. Sorry, jig is up India, no one believes your lies anymore.
It's different because the aussie leadership actually recognize it as a problem. In the US it's just business as usual.
The same situation exists in Canada with the government screaming about the need to allow foreigners into the country to take jobs "because it is good for the economy". Rubbish. The only benefit to employers is wage suppression and to government is more tax revenue and most importantly more favourable voters. I have nothing against truly skilled immigrants - please come immediately - but when I encounter IT workers claiming *nix experience yet they cannot tell me how to list the contents of a subdirectory or sort a list of names (surname, given name) in a file extracting only the unique names that begin with the letters 'Sm' in the surname and allow them 15 minutes while I am off doing something else, I have to question their competence.
why do indians all think they have some right to go into someone else's country, when it's none of their F-ing business ?? Right or wrong, if a country like the U.S. or Aus wants to limit the number of scab job-robbers, then that that is their business - NOT india's. Fix your own toilet country, and then you won't need to worry about the labor policies of other countries. india has it's independence, so deal with that and make that work, stay out of where you aren't wanted and you don't belong. We don't live in a one-nation world poo-joos
There are loads of Aussie IT staff. It's just that most of them are in London. Seriously, if you've ever worked in the City you would know. Thousands of 'em! And that's fine, they're generally no better or worse than any home grown talent and mostly a friendly bunch. However, many of them have a trump card.....the dual dationality thing. The rest of us don't get that. I'd always viewed the Aussie's as being in a privileged position. They have the dual nationality (some of them), they have an apparently good education system and a weird travel gene that kicks in some time after puberty. This makes many of them want to travel to far off lands and for the lucky IT people, earn more dosh than they could at home.
So, their Prime Minister is fighting against a fairly killer combo.
Have a look at yourselves in a mirror.
GROW UP.
This whole discussion is an unseemly airing of our collective political "dirty linen".
Oh, sorry, we do that every so often, and make the rest of the world wonder what being "down under" (standing on our heads) does for the collective blood-flow to the brains, and also wonder shy they would bother to visit and get the same malady.
As I said, GROW UP!
Please... ?!?!?!!!!!!
Looking at space, radio, science and computing from a 'down-under' amateur enthusiast perspective.
there's also the fact a great deal of the practice of medicine still depends on actual physical contact and direct interaction with the patient. In some cases, like emergencies and whatnot, this direct intervation on a person's body can actually save their life, or so I've heard.
to addres your carpenter comment, if I hired someone to build a closet or something custom made for a room in my house, I would prefer them not work off of pictures, but actually come and take measurements and, if the thing is big, maybe it's easier to build (assemble) on site.
if I was having the walls in my house painted I'd also prefer not to ship them overseas...because of the wait mostly.
Also, when ordering chinese food takeout, I'd favor local suppliers over the ones still based in Shaghai or wherever....I like my food to arrive warm.
As for software, I find lately that there is "good" code written by people in countries I wouldn't have expected, and it surprises me. The other day I found a cloud-ish based thing that's created by some guys in a university in south america, and some other from spain, and another I couldn't understand because it was all in french, but the website had pretty pictures and colors.
the foreign workers are necessary to drive growth in Australia's IT industry, while others have cited examples where large Australian companies have imported workers needlessly, displacing qualified Aussie personnel."
Oddly, this seems paradoxical as probably both are true. Australia probably needs to import IT workers, just not to displace current workers.
As someone living in Perth who has been trying (and failing) to find a job in software development (or IT more broadly) for quite a while now, I support this idea if it means people like me get hired instead of some foreign guy here on a work visa.
If you only let in workers that produce more than average, then you are increasing your per-person GDP.
Learn to love Alaska
Yeah, Australia has a relatively easy points-based immigration system that is easy to get in with, if you have enough education and experience in a proper job field. Workers like me who go there to work don't do so on a 457 visa, we get work visas or resident visas.
Learn to love Alaska
Why is it that Slashdot hears "it worker" and thinks "programmer"?
Learn to love Alaska
And we can applaud them for that. In fact we can even say that this policy should have been in place couple of hundred years ago and every pale skin (and the Spanish kind too) that tried to enter the Australian soil (and the Americas) should have been exterminated upon arrival. Sorry, what was the subject again, dark skins coming to Australia/US? Oh, sorry mate, I recon this is something else then, carry on!
That's why the US is ruined. They'd spend more money on importing labor than training up internal people. Eventually, the US will be 100% service economy, supporting the rest of the world.
Learn to love Alaska
It's a reasonable position - I don't know the particulars of the tax system in Australia, but in any country where the wealthy carry the majority of the tax burden ( = the bulk of tax income comes from flat or progressive taxes) it's hard to justify them receiving fewer direct benefits than the poor: Basically "We're the ones paying most of the bill, why are we getting the smallest portions?". Of course the reality of income-independent benefits would be that they end up paying even more in taxes to pay for the extra benefits and probably wouldn't do much better than breaking even, but there are actually several benefits to such a scheme:
- Greater perceived fairness. It's largely an irrational emotional reaction, but that doesn't make it any less legitimate.
- Greater incentives for the poor to work harder. One of the big problems with most entitlement plans is that for every extra dollar you earn you lose some portion of a dollar in benefits. In the US you actually risk losing considerably *more* than a dollar in benefits. That means the people who are the greatest economic burden on the country have the *least* direct economic incentive to try to earn more.
- Lower bureaucratic overhead. I don't know about Australia, but in the US there are armies of people employed for no other reason than to determine the level of benefits you qualify for. If instead it was simply a matter of anyone who wanted to could present their ID and receive their standardized benefits you could save an enormous amount of money, possibly enough to pay for a fair portion of the increased overall benefit costs. And all those bureaucrats could instead get jobs doing something actually productive. (Must resist urge to make obvious joke)
- And finally it completely eliminates all the regulatory cracks that people fall through. No bureaucratic delays that leave you starving on the street for weeks or months after losing the job that was just keeping your head above water. No "Sorry, but the third letter of your last name is R, which since you applied on the 12th of the month and entered a value not divisible by 17 on line 946 of your application means you don't qualify"
Of course there's also the risk that you'll get the middle class accustomed to getting handouts (The rich mostly already being accustomed to arranging their own much more lucrative handouts anyway), and I could see how that would worry those who consider socialism to be a dirty word. But frankly you're talking about a group for whom the entitlements will be a minority portion of their income, and who are presumably competent enough to realize that any time they try to increase their benefits they'll actually be losing money since have to pay for a portion of the handouts going to the poor. The exception of course being those situations where the government can legitimately provide non-monetary benefits considerably more cheaply than they can be acquired by private individuals.
My own preferred implementation would be something that made the economics of income redistribution very transparent and straightforward so that politicians have a hard time gaming the system for their own ends, because there are in fact some serious risks to unconstrained income redistribution. Say having a constitutional requirement that all entitlements to be paid for from a separate, dedicated "redistribution tax"to be paid in parallel with income tax, with no option to transfer funds to/from the broader government coffers. Preferably something extremely simple like a flat tax on gross income - no loophole exploitation possible, with all money left over after paying for non-monetary entitlements being distributed equally among citizens. That way everyone has a nice direct feedback on the health of the nation's economy - the poor want the rich to get richer because that means more money directly into their own pockets as well, provided the gains don't all come at the expense of the middle class.
Obviously there's lots of details to be considered, things lik
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Only evidence mentioned was "the number of people coming here to fill short-term gaps should not be growing twenty times faster than employment overall."
Search about a skills gap in Australia brings up the usual, Australian Industry Group an employers' organization.
Shilling for corporations?
Hey dude, are you going to let a overwhelming track record of failure and sociopathic behavior influence your decisions who you would trust with your money?
That almost sounds like you're highly intelligent and prudent.
If you can't get a good job as a software engineer in the US, its not because of offshore workers, it's because you're probably not very good at what you do. I interview people for soft eng jobs, domestic and foreign, and by and large, most of them are complete idiots who cannot answer basic 1st year CS questions (I dropped out after 1 year, so I'm not being a collegefag snob, this is basic stuff every programmer should know).
If that were true, the employers wouldn't agitate so hard for the immigration reforms. In some areas of some companies it's true, but a lot of companies - even tech companies - are still pretty tied to physical presence in physical offices in specific locations.
It does line up with my personal beliefs, but all with the political compass. 2010. 2007.
I haven't seen a lot to be concerned about with Brown's intended regulations.
Back in the 80's, my (then) wife and I decided we might consider emigrating somewhere warm. We got an information pack from the Australian something-or-other.
She was a nurse, I was an IT professional - both of us well educated/qualified by the standards of the day.
Australia didn't include general nurses or IT people on their list of people they'd even consider. 2 of the highest priority "skills" on their list, and therefore highest chance of being considered, were Bricklayers and Psychiatric /Mental Health Nurses. After briefly considering switching careers (I was qualified and would've been comfortable as an Electrician or Electronics Engineer) and finding they weren't listed either, that was the first and last time we thought about Australia.
I hope you feel the same way when it's Tony Abbott's appointees harassing the Sydney Morning Herald instead of Julia Gillards appointees harassing the Daily Telegraph.
"Cursed is he who rises early in the morning..." Isiah 5:11
Skills shortage, hey?
Head over to Seek (seek.com.au), which a local can confirm is arguably one of the most popular job search engines in Australia.
Pick Adelaide as a region, "C++" as a skill. Yes, I know Adelaide is a small capital city, don't get me started.
Six hits. A few weeks ago, it was four.
Four of those hits *require* an additional mandatory skill or language beyond C++, or security clearance.
Of the remaining two, I can confirm that last year, one of them wasn't interested in a First-Class Comp Sci Honours graduate C++ software developer with well over ten years of experience. They didn't even reply. Think about that for a moment.
That leaves one opening. For how many existing developers and new graduates?
Let's try Hobart now.
No jobs at all.
Same for Darwin. No jobs.
What skills shortage?
And yes, I do know that cities such as Melbourne and Sydney have many more opportunities.
Yes. But if there are more children born per year than immigrants per year it would be good to also make sure that those children do well too.
If you were at top and didn't care you could just keep importing workers. You'd still do well - the country might eventually decline, but you can leave it once you've sucked out enough.
If that was even remotely true, then I would be employed right now rather than taking the time to re-skill for the market.
I say this, since we're going through the same thing (hiring on noobz just outta academia since they're cheaper, &/or hiring on foreign workers for the SAME reasons - the "holy dollar" - anything to make mgt. "get a BIG bonus" & keep their 1%'er investment class trust fund babies rich and fat, and the rest of us poor by comparison (most important in courts of "law", using that last term sarcastically, more on that below @ this posts' termination in fact)).
Greed is ruinous... especially for economies.
I mean, seriously: Once the people "leading us" start to "get it" (& oh, I think or rather KNOW they do, but are short-term thinkers GAINING by this policy & hell with the long-term, since they are wealthy themselves), & they need to "get it", just as YOUR politicians obviously have!
The point they need to "get" that you CAN'T HAVE AN 'ECONOMY' (or rather a healthy one) WHEN THE BULK OF PEOPLE IN IT DON'T HAVE GOOD PAYING JOBS WITH DISPOSABLE INCOME!
(Meaning beyond the basic essentials needed for survival in rent/mortgage, utilities, & food).
Joe Public ordinary little avg. guy - when they don't have that? Small businesses that are NOT in those categories get less customers (meaning they either raise prices or die). Then their suppliers do the same, or die, also.
This goes all the way up and down the food chain until you get the mess that results (and only the 1%'ers have any disposable income, albeit TONS MORE THAN THEY WILL EVER NEED, & the rest of you? ZERO!). Fact is, the "1%'ers wealthy", despite hoarding/scamming all the money, will NEVER spend as much as the 99% rest of us, fueling a healthy economy.
A child can understand this.
For that "1%'er" wealthy? It also ends up with a nice "ancillary benefit" - keeping you POOR, meaning you get NO LAW IN COURTS either, because law (forget justice) co$t$ MONEY!.
Your leaders, apparently @ least on the surface of this, just aren't corporate puppets (yet) is all. Good for you guys, I envy you that. Unfortunately, after looking around my entire life (1/2 century now almost), that's what I see here. Oh, not ALL our US politicians are, & I suspect initially, most aren't... until they get caught in the blender of deceit & treachery + arm twisting of politics itself in the world, finding out they either "get with it" & adapt, be as bogus as the next guy, or get the axe from the TRUE "powers that be" (the wealthy).
The end result of this? Well, I see a LOT of the "surveillance society" starting up the past decade++ now or so, more than ever before - that's a signal to me that those self-same "powers that be" are REACTING, & the only way they know how to because of the scumbag environs in politics - start trying to 'dig up dirt' on opponents.
What will 'backfire' on them? Those that are in there, KNOWING it's bogus & wrong - & you can bank on it that those in power @ the top fear the hell out of them, since they can't ID them easily... there are PLENTY OF THEM too, just waiting for a chance to unseat the real problem, which resides at the top of things (see above).
APK
P.S.=> That is the real world in a nutshell and what it's degraded to once the biggest crooks there is (from the IMF on downwards) took control... & I only speak of what I have observed in 1/2 a century of existence, & it makes me sad to see is all!
... apk
No. There are many companies developing software only in Australia, such as defence contractors. That work is not available to overseas programmers.
Heavy is the head that wears the tinfoil hat.
From the banter in the House of Representatives about this topic, the focus is wholly on companies that wrought the system by applying to bring labour in from overseas under the guises of skilled labour shortage, and then assigning them tasks better suited to janitors or clerics. I.E. Companies have been purposefully advertising for doctors and psychiatrists, they hire whoever they like, if they don't have proper qualifications they get paid less, they are stringed up because on the whim of the company they get deported, so some aren't making minimum wage, and then are required to clean toilets and the like. The work of a janitor is hard skilled labour, and therefore there is no shortage. Companies are abusing this in multiple sectors to bring in cheap labour of which Australia has no labour shortage in. Take IT workers for example, maybe they get here and are then assigned telemarketing jobs or help desk jobs, when the advertisements say Network Administrator or Software Engineer. Geeze for a site touted as "News for Nerds" some of you guys really don't try to educate yourselves before jumping into the conversation and being less than helpful.
I recently worked in a small Australian software development company with around 50 developers doing run of the mill VB and SQL Server work. Out of those 50 people there were approx 30 different nationalities many of whom were in the process of applying for residency. All geniuses with unique skills and experience? Far from it.
You only have to read through the IT jobs ads on seek to see how employers rort the 457. List a job with a ridiculous skill set, offer a wage that will guarantee no one with those skills will apply. Hey presto, you have a watertight case to import the person of your choice from wherever you like. No one ever checks they end up doing the job that was advertised, or that the skills required were relevant to the job.