AUTHORITIES in Western Australia are set to ignore government policy in order to bring in as many Irish workers as they can to solve the area’s labour shortage.
The state’s training and workforce minister Peter Collier travelled to Ireland in July and says he and the Government discussed using temporary company-sponsored visas to bring "as many as they give us" to the country.
Mr Collier was quoted in the Western Australian newspaper as saying of the long-term unemployed here: "A lot of these people are middle-aged, they’ve been retrenched. So come over to Western Australia, spend 18 months to two years with us, help us out, then you can go home. We’ve got no language barrier, no qualification barriers, it’s a relationship born in heaven."
Mr Collier said that he had approached Australia’s immigration minister Chris Bowen but the latter had ignored initiatives which he was proposing in association with Ireland’s Training and Skills Minister Ciarán Cannon.
He told a business forum that Western Australia did not need federal approval to assign a temporary "457 visas" and that there was no cap on the number of such visas.
"I’m sick of talking to Chris Bowen about it," Mr Collier was quoted as saying. "I’m working with Ciarán Cannon and the Irish government and we’re going to go around the feds on this thing. We’ll work with the Irish government and we’ll hold it up as a big success."
In recent months, it emerged that more than two-thirds of Irish emigrants are choosing Western Australia over popular locations such as Sydney and Melbourne. Experts said a skills shortage, largely as a result of the mining boom in western Australia, was encouraging thousands of Irish jobseekers to locate there.
The Australian government has defended its position on migration, pointing out that it has added 12,000 skilled migration places nationally and allocated 6,200 to Western Australia.
"But this government is also balancing the importance of maximising prosperity for all Australians, ensuring communities are sustainable, while maintaining job opportunities for local workers," a spokesman said.
a d v e r t i s e m e n t
This appeared in the printed version of the Irish Examiner Thursday, November 03, 2011
