Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs Legislation Committee, , 7:39:35 to 7:41:46
Senator Duniam asks about the transition between Ministerial Directions 119, 121, and 122, which established new processing priorities for skilled visas to favor onshore applicants and specific high-priority industries.
Topics: Employment, Workplace relations
Speakers: Clare Sharp, Unknown Speaker, Hon Jonathon Duniam, Senator Jana Stewart
Senator Roberts, thank you very much. I am going to take the opportunity to share the call. Senator Duniam.
Could I ask please about direction 119, which commenced as I understand it on the 25th of July this year, There was a change.
So in the budget this year, the government announced it when it was announcing the permanent migration programme and that it would retain it at 185,000 places. It also announced that it would shift the focus of the program so that there was 70% of places went to people who were already on shore in Australia and 30% would could go to those who are offshore. Ministerial direction 119 was put in place to give us the best chance of ensuring we could achieve that 7030 split because it involved shifting our priority quite substantially to get more of our cases from the onshore cohort.
Sure.
It worked very effectively. And we'd always intended that it wouldn't be a direction that needed to be in place for more than a few months. So we were able to, after about I think it was about 10 weeks of operation, we were in a position where we could say to the government, yep, we're pretty confident you can get to the 70-30 split, but you can free up more space for some more high priority industries. So one two, one and one two, two came, and the big difference between them is in 119, we the only kind of specified industry that could sit above onshore applications was defence and law enforcement.
Sure.
When we could move after that 10-week period to a wider group of industries, we were able to pick up industries like agriculture, aquaculture, construction, mining, health care, teaching, uh a wider group of priority industries.