Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Immigration) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

Item 2 of Schedule 7 of Select Legislative Instrument 2005 No. 240, Migration Amendment Regulations 2005 (No. 9) , Division 1.4E—Sponsorship: trade skills training (incorporating Subdivisions 1.4E1 to 1.4E4) and made under the Migration Act 1958 , be disallowed.

This motion seeks to abolish the trade skills training visa. The disallowance motion before the parliament is put forward on the grounds that the trade skills training visa is bad policy and was poorly thought out. We are left in a situation where the government will be doing two things with this visa: they will be taking opportunities away from young Australians and they will be driving wages down.

It is important to acknowledge what this visa is not, because it is different from two things it has been characterisedas being in some of the commentary. Firstly, it is different from a visa under the skilled migration scheme; secondly, it is different from a visa for overseas students studying at university. It is different from a visa under the skilled migration scheme because new apprentices are not skilled migrants. The whole concept of starting an apprenticeship is to acquire a skill. What we have here is vastly different from the skilled migration scheme which operates in so many other areas. While we have many objections to the lack of planning and the way in which this government has run its skilled migration scheme, and we think it could be done much better, we would never think of trying to disallow it.

The apprenticeship visa was a bad idea from the start, and it is different from a visa granted to an overseas student to study at university. In question time today in the other place the minister, in what I would regard as a rather extraordinary answer to a question—not the least because, if the pink is accurate, she referred to Belfast as a city of England—

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