No serious person is saying 'migrants are taking our jobs', everyone knows they were invited here. The issue is the way in which big business uses mass immigration to cap wages and raise property investment prices, and uses 'skilled immigration' to save on training costs. This is the major reason why one house in a coastal suburb is worth more than some streets are worth in less well off areas.

Gillard's 457 policy is just another desperate stab in the dark by a Government about to fall.

< The fact that Pauline Hanson has come out in support of Prime Minister Gillard's pledge to "put Aussie workers first" starkly demonstrates the dangerous ground that the PM and a few trade unions have ventured onto >

As if to say that just because Hanson says something, it must be highly dodgy!

Sheesh Andrew, what a terrible way to start your article! It does your credibility as a balanced commentator a wold of good – NOT!

However, I am pleased to say that all-considered, it is actually not a bad article!

< Immigration policy is hugely important to the future of Australia, both socially and economically. >

Absolutely. And we should most definitely be looking at it in a holistic manner. The same level of attention on the current absurdly high level of immigration and all its negative consequences as we are seeing with asylum seeking, wouldn’t go astray. It is afterall much more important.

< If there are people breaking the rules, it makes much more sense to put energy into enforcing the existing rules rather than create another set of rules… >

Now you are definitely talking my language! In this regard, we should be cracking right down on visa overstayers.

Yes we should be looking at the working holiday visa category.

But none of this detracts from Gillard’s and Hanson’s desire to refine 457 visas to make them apply to only those jobs where foreign skilled workers are really needed.

What's good for the goose is good for the gander.
Almost every thinking person knows that the coalition played the race card with asylum seekers? [Starting with the Tampa and storm troopers, confronting unarmed asylum seekers?]
The Govt has lost control of our borders, the coalition bellow!
Little wonder, given Labour caved in to coalition demands to reinstate the pacific solution, even though their experts told them, it wouldn't work!
I didn't like John Howard and most of his policies, but I did respect his courage of conviction, even when I believed he was wrong.
I lost all respect for Gillard and her Govt, when they folded and acquiesced to the coalition over asylum seekers!
What's the odds that the coalition in Govt, finds the Malaysia solution suddenly palatable, and indeed, successful.
Why would anyone pay for a very expensive and extremely risky boat ride, if the only outcome was a return to the start of the queue?
As I recall the sequence of events, it was Hansen agreeing with Gillard not visa versa!
Gillard has no control over who does or doesn't agree with her!
As for 457 visas, we do need to ensure that they are not being misused by a few rouge employers, as a way to employ cheap labour.
However, if we crack down too hard, we could conceivably remove most of our current health workers, from rural and regional Australia.

Some might think that $15.00 an hour is not a lot of money, to swelter in the Australian summer heat, harvesting crops that can only ever be hand harvested! However, if you include free accommodation etc, it's not such a bad deal; and better every which way, than sit down money!
If we were to prevent imported seasonal workers, much of this food would be ploughed in; and, replaced with inferior imports.

Skilled 457 visas, ought to be connected to apprenticeship training.
It should fill two purposes, make up the TEMPORARY shortfall in skills, and train enough new specialist occupation numbers, to ensure, we don't continue to have a skills shortage going forward!
Rhrosty.

…And any bright button would long ago have concluded that 457 visas will achieve for Abbott a “Work Choices” by another name. Another “slimy” wedge politic tool in the Liberal quiver so reminiscent of Howard: Wouldn’t it be lovely if Abbott were actually original!

Andrew I can not agree that because Hanson is sounding like she is in agreement with Gillard that this is a "dangerous development". Ignoring the corrupt way that some so-called "employers" are exploiting the 457 visa system IS "dangerous", I have personal experience of how unscrupulous these exploiters can be, I and about twenty other Australians were flown to Darwin on the week end to complete a "test", about half way through this "test" we were stopped for lunch, during which I bumped into a old friend who was a teacher at the uni/tafe, he told me that during the week Filipinos were being "tutored" to "pass" a single element of the "test", after lunch we were taken back to the motel, I never heard any results of the "test" and the company never contacted me, I was at least $500 dollars out pocket, and when I phoned the Darwin office they said they were "full up". They used us to pretend that they could not get the "skills" in Australia to justify importing Filipinos,the company refused to reimburse me for my costs and the Department set up by the Howard Government, because of the many complaints, claimed they could do nothing to "help me" because I was not an "employee" of the company, a typical "catch 22". Genuine skilled 457 visa holders may be an advantage to some companies but without serious monitoring, and serious fines for offenders the 457 scheme is going to be exploited to the detriment of Australian workers.

The idea that White Australians have this "paranoia" about immigration is a strawman, if you look at history as a continuum instead of subjectively you find that this has never been the case.
The main beef we have with immigration has always that we don't want to see the kind of insular immigrant underclass found in Asian societies and lately in Europe and the U.S forming in Australia.
Slavery and exploitation of workers has always been resisted in this country and we have to be ever vigilant against it's tolerance and acceptance. Even where it has occurred, (I'm thinking of the Aboriginal agricultural workers) it's now something we're right to be collectively ashamed of. However Asians in particular don't see the world the way White people do, they don't believe in equality or the "fair go", this idea that we've always been jealous of their zeal and industry is also a myth, it's always been about their hostile attitudes, unfair business practices and poor treatment of others, particularly of their imported labourers.

The other problem is that it's impossible for an Australian to compete with Asian labour, I can't support a wife and two kids on $70 a day, which is what some immigrants and foreign students work for in the building industry.
The overheads I have to pay as a sub contractor and the expenses of even a basic lifestyle mean that at a minimum I need to make 400 a day..and that's a lifestyle with no holidays, no health insurance, no home maintenance, no luxuries such as going out, drinking alchohol, movies, restaurants and so on.
For me to live on $70 a day petrol, housing and all utility bills would have to be completely free and food would have to be heavily subsidised.

Our current rate of population growth of 1.6% will double our population in a little over 43 years, and if maintained, it will go on doubling it every 43 years out to standing room only. Our fertility rate has been slightly below replacement level since 1976, so the population would stabilize without the mass migration.

Total GDP and GDP per capita stopped going up together in 1998. GDP per capita grew much more slowly after that, and has been completely stagnant since the end of 2006, All the economic growth since then is just due to having more people, not because the average person is any better off

http://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2012/05/highrise-harry-wants-more-people/

If all this mass migration is so wonderful, why aren't we getting richer on average? According to Roy Morgan research, the real unemployment rate is 10% on top of an 8% underemployment rate. The taxpayers, of course, get to pay the direct and social costs for all the people who are excluded.

Apart from the various quality of life issues, such as congestion and high housing costs, our environment has been taking terrible abuse, with a lot of the damage directly or indirectly linked to having more people. We rank 48 on the Environmental Performance Index and 17 out of 17 on the Conference Board of Canada's report cards for developed countries

http://epi.yale.edu/epi2012/rankings
http://www.conferenceboard.ca/hcp/details/environment.aspx#context

The Australian Conservation Foundation has nominated human population growth in Australia as a key threatening process under the Environmental Protection Act

http://www.acfonline.org.au/sites/default/files/resources/EPBC_nomination_22-3-10.pdf

Andrew Bartlett will no doubt claim to be a humanitarian, but deliberately or not, he is serving the interests of the corporate elite, who want bigger markets, lots of rent-seeking opportunities, such as on the sale of residential land or control of water, and a cheap compliant work force that they don't have to train.

I am reminded of an experiment where a virgin female rat was given maternal hormones and taught that if she pressed a lever, a rat pup would be delivered to her cage. She just kept pressing even though the cage floor was completely covered with rat pups.

It always bemuses me how obsessed our media are with refugees who arrive by sea to the point of whinging about people being arrested in INdonesia as if Indonesia is just a wing of Australia.

Refugees are not migrants, asylum seekers are not migrants as our worthless media claim, they are people in need of protection. Calling them migrants is the same as calling patients in hospitals "staff".

OUr media and lazy deranged pollies seem to have forgotten one simple and universal law co-written by Australia - EVERYONE has the right to seek asylum from persecution.

NO mention of money or smuggling or waiting or any of the crap we have developed with the help of lazy media in this country.

Employers of foreigners working on 457 visas must abide by Australian wages and conditions. This is not a major threat to conditions for Australian workers. It is exploitation of foreign workers in their homelands, too cowed in countries like the Prison Republic of China, which sets the standard by which Australian workers are threatened. This would not happen without foreign trade which uses importation of tariff-free goods as an ongoing threat to Australian conditions. A government serving the Australian nation rather than greedy pigs living off the fruits of foreign police state repression would defy the globalisers, opt out of WTO and install an exploitation-indexed tariff system that forces competition on quality, not el cheapo conditions and brutal repression. This would breathe new life into Australian industries destroyed by importing the vile conditions under which people in slave countries like China live while leaving the exploited victims imprisoned under the regimes of their own countries.

EmperorJulian

The "greedy pigs living off the fruits of foreign police state repression" are any one of us who buys a TV or T shirt made in China at a fraction of the price it would cost if made here.

We are all better off - Chinese and Australians - if we produce what we're good at, and they produce what they're good at, and we trade.

Do you seriously believe that the Chinese would be better off if they did not have industries selling exports? In 1981, more than 80% of China's population lived in absolute poverty. By 2008, it was 13%. Global trade has been the main cause of China's economic transformation. If you seriously cared about poverty in China, you would welcome free trade.

Data”
http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.POV.DDAY

Rhian writes: “We are all better off - Chinese and Australians - if we produce what we're good at, and they produce what they're good at, and we trade.”

Who says the Chinese are better at producing the consumer goods in competition than Australians? I think the term Rhian is groping for is CHEAPER. Competition between workforces across national boundaries (behind which workers are by and large confined) is both based on quality (e.g. Italian boutique shoes) and price (e.g. slave production as in China and much of the rest of Asia). Importing goods on the basis of price competition uses the misery of slaves to attack wages and conditions in the importing country. This is so even when the slaves are allowed a small share of the income from sale of the goods they produce.

Sure some of the exploitation of Chinese slaves is merely thoughtless - seems good to have access to cheap goods (while forgetting the enormous social and economic consequences of destroying manufacturing industry in countries like Australia and America). The greedy pigs are those investors who shift manufacturing to slave countries - not thoughtless but carefully planned and promoted through compliant politicians, and through careerist mandarins as in DFAT, busily engineering endless free trade deals. The hullabaloo over 457 visas is a red herring.

EmperorJulian

Some basic economics

Average incomes in a country are chiefly determined by its average level of productivity. If an average Chinese person produces 25% of what an average Australian produces, their wages are going to be about 25% of Australian wages. That’s not “exploitation”, it’s inevitable. An individual Chinese teacher or production worker may be no less productive that their Australian counterpart, or even more productive. But across the Chinese economy as a whole, it takes a lot more people to produce a given quantity of goods and services than it does here, and Chinese average wages reflect that. Similarly, the growth in living standards and wages in China in recent years, and the dramatic drop in poverty, is because China is producing a lot more stuff than it used to, even though it still lags far behind Australia in its average productivity and therefore average wages.

What matters in trade is not the absolute advantage of one country over another, but comparative advantage. China may be able to produce producing both T shirts and cars more cheaply than Australia, but if it produces T shirts much more cheaply and cars only somewhat more cheaply then it makes sense for us to export cars and import T shirts.

A nice simple explanation here:
http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/ComparativeAdvantage.html

Trade causes employment to shift from some industries to others, but it doesn’t mean unemployment overall is higher.

You may have noticed that Australia is almost unique in the developed world in having escaped a recession due the GFC. Trade with China was a crucial factor in keeping our economy growing.