The ABC is celebrating Albo’s attempt to address Australia’s burgeoning underclass of migrant workers (having labeled anybody discussing it “racist” for ten years):
It’s called the TSMIT — the temporary skilled migration income threshold.
Set for the last decade at $53,900, it’s the minimum rate an employer has to undertake to pay a sponsored worker under the temporary skills program. And it also the minimum rate for the employer sponsored part of the permanent migration program.
…The government has announced it will lift the TSMIT rate to $70,000 from July 1: the rate it would have been at if it had been indexed all this time.
…One of the reasons why it has been broadly acknowledged that the rate has to rise is that it is one of the factors that has helped flood the pool of people seeking to become permanent residents — or at least to keep rolling over temporary visas — with relatively low skilled workers and made it more difficult for higher skilled workers to get into the country.
This rate is obviously still too low. The median full-time wage (which is pulled down by unskilled workers) is $85,000. The unions wanted $90k. The TSMIT also has not been indexed to wage growth, meaning it will erode over time.
The shockingly compromised corporate shill Grattan Institute gave Albo cover to lowball workers.
Moreover, other changes to the system will do far more to entrench the migrant underclass and low wages.
As we know, Albo recently traveled to India to watch the cricket. At least, that’s what we should wish he was doing. Instead, the PM was busy signing up for the worst bilateral labour market deal in developed market history.
The Mechanism for Mutual Recognition of Qualifications equalises the legal validity of all Indian degrees versus their Australian equivalents.
Take a look at the document. It was clearly drafted by the Indian side on some ancient typewriter, punch holes intact!
Did Albo’s delegation even read it? It requires Australia to recognise all Indian:
- Senior secondary education qualifications awarded by a relevant board or council of senior secondary education or awarded by any other authority empowered by the Government of India.
- Technical and vocational education and training qualifications awarded by institutions approved by the All-lndia Council for Technical Education (AICTE) and/ or National Council for Vocational Education and Training (NCVET) and/or its equivalent body and State Councils for Vocational Training (SCVT).
- Higher education qualifications awarded by institutions authorised by the University Grants Commission (UGC), the All-lndia Council for Technical Education (AICTE), the National Council for Teacher Education (NCTE), as well as other equivalent bodies.
I have traveled to India extensively. And experienced the joys of its white-collar professionals.
- In its medical system, I was forced to crash tackle a doctor off my brother as he treated a minor eye complaint with a spoon.
- On a golf course, I was forced to chase a professional down the fairway as he fled with my wallet.
- In hospitality, I was repeatedly burgled, extorted, and abused, then, when reporting incidents to the police, doubly so.
- In transport, I missed my flight after sitting in a six-hour traffic jam on the airport “freeway” of a major city owing to an inexplicable 80-foot ziggurat of garbage blocking seven of eight lanes and grazed by cows.
I could go on. India is chaos. The poverty is unbelievable. Its people undertake whatever scam is necessary to survive and Westerners are the numero uno target (understandably so!).
But don’t take my word for it. Bloomberg has a terrific investigative piece on the approaching calamity for Australian services quality:
Business is booming in India’s $117 billion education industry and new colleges are popping up at breakneck speed. Yet thousands of young Indians are finding themselves graduating with limited or no skills, undercutting the economy at a pivotal moment of growth.
Desperate to get ahead, some of these young people are paying for two or three degrees in the hopes of finally landing a job. They are drawn to colleges popping up inside small apartment buildings or inside shops in marketplaces. Highways are lined with billboards for institutions promising job placements.
…The problems at colleges extend across the country, with a string of institutions in various states drawing official scrutiny. In some parts of India, students have gone on hunger strikes protesting the lack of teachers and facilities at their institutes. In January, charges were filed against Himachal Pradesh-based Manav Bharti University and its promoters for allegedly selling fake degrees, according to a press release from the Directorate of Enforcement. Manav Bharti University didn’t respond to request for comment.
…Anil Swarup, a former secretary for school education estimated in a 2018 article that of 16,000 colleges handing out bachelor’s qualifications for teachers, a large number existed only in name.
“Calling such so-called degrees as being worthless would be by far an understatement,” said Anil Sadgopal, a former dean of education at Delhi University and a former member of the Central Advisory Board of Education, which guides the federal government. “When millions of young people are rendered unemployable every year, the entire society becomes unstable.”
Why would Albo import these problems? A few reasons spring to mind:
- in the panic to replace China as our developed market sugar daddy, Australian labour market integrity is the baby thrown out with the bathwater, and
- geopolitical reorientation.
Not all of these reasons are bad but the deal that Albo has signed up for is disastrous for all concerned:
- Australian professionals will now compete with “worthless” degrees and cheap foreign labour further up the labour market value chain;
- employers will waste countless hours and dollars employing the unemployable, sacking, rehiring, retraining, and lowering productivity;
- ultimately, Indian (and all) migrants will suffer as the credibility of foreign degrees is engulfed by a dark cloud of suspicion, entrenching underclass status;
- Australia will face enormous pressure to not back out of the deal, lest it upsets our new ally, and
- the same deal will now be proposed and rightly argued for by every backwater education system worldwide.
I hope that the ABC is right and Albo has fixed the impacts upon the labour market of a debased immigration system.
But I fear that all he has done is spread them far and wide.
