457 Visas.

The introduction of 457 Visas was clearly intended to plug a gaping hole where Australian industry was being crippled by a lack of workers skilled in needed professional work categories.   It quickly extended into less skilled areas when labourers were imported to fill gaps in distant mining projects that Australian workers shunned. It was never intended to compete with the Australian workforce - and deny Australians a job in their own country.

It now seems that is exactly what is happening in Australian hospitals. Nursing has undergone a vast change in recent decades.  The " learn on the job " era is well and truly over.  To graduate as a registered nurse takes university training to handle the immense rise in technicality that now applies to this profession and between 2005-2012 the number of Australian nurses reaching graduation increased by fifty percent - and many can not get a job in an Australian hospital.

In that same period, the number of foreign nurses entering Australia on 457 Visas rose from 2697 annually - to 3118 - and that makes absolutely no sense.    Nurses with a university bill to settle from their training have every right to ask why the jobs that are being denied to them are filled with foreign nurses who are supposedly filling a perceived " vacancy gap " ?

It is estimated that at present 1,100 Australian nurses with graduate qualifications are unable to find a permanent position in Australian hospitals.   They are forced to make endless work applications and have to rely on temporary fill in positions or work in lower ranking jobs such as doctor's receptionists or chemist shops - or leave Australia and work in foreign hospitals !

The danger is that if this situation continues the numbers enrolling in nursing training will drop sharply because nursing will be regarded as an " over filled " profession which does not offer acceptable work opportunities.

Obviously, the bottleneck that has created this problem rests with the Mandarins of the public service  who juggle figures and decide where job vacancies exist that need the granting of 457 Visas to fill gaps.   Someone got it badly wrong when it came to nursing numbers - and it seems that they are slow to learn and reluctant to makes the changes that will rectify the problem.

It seems that in this age of austerity we need to find Mandarins with the ability to accurately add and subtract figures to arrive at a true situation if we are to clean up this 457 Visa mess.