Migration Alliance headquarters hosted a very different CPD today.  Provided by Legal Training Australia, the learning and development took on a new twist with RMAs donning Anonymous masks.

Did they attend?  Did they not attend?  Who were they?  Were they even agents?

Agents stand together in celebration of Migration Alliance's role in deregulating CPD and leaving it open to competitive market forces (see today's Minister's release on Review of the Office of the MARA).

GOVERNMENT RELEASES OMARA REVIEW 

Consistent with the Coalition’s deregulation agenda the Government will adopt the majority of the recommendations of the independent review into the Office of the Migration Agents Registration Authority (OMARA). 

Assistant Minister for Immigration and Border Protection, Senator the Hon Michaelia Cash, said the implementation of the review’s findings will reduce unnecessary red tape and improve outcomes for consumers of migration services who are often amongst the most vulnerable in the community. 

A blanket ban disallowing the counting of volunteer work for the purposes of qualifying for a second work holiday visa has been the response of the department of immigration to the alleged widespread abuse of the sc417 visa programme.

There will be nothing to stop legitimate volunteers working for worthy causes which deliver valuable community services but their good intentions will not be allowed to be counted towards eligibility for a second visa.

The reforms are part of the government’s new measures to increase the integrity of the program. The change essentially require those seeking to apply for a second Working Holiday visa to produce an official payslip from their employer, demonstrating they have completed their regional work component. A DIBP media release states that the change will take some time to introduce, and is not yet in effect, so it does not impact upon current second Working Holiday visa applications at present.

The damage of this blanket ban on voluntary work however could see the end of organisations like Willing Workers on Organic Farms (WWOOF) which has some 2,600 hosts in Australia.

"If the government brings in this business of backpackers needing to produce a payslip to get their 88 days to extend their visa for a year, that's going to hurt the WWOOF organisation quite a bit," Lismore farmer Geof Bugden told the ABC recently. Mr Bugden relies on WWOOF workers.

WWOOF essentially link backpackers to organic farmers by giving them the opportunity to work on Australian organic farms, exchanging 4 - 6 hours work per day for meals and accommodation, usually in the farmer’s family home.

Between 29 March 2015 and 1 April 2015, a number of blog posts and Tweets were published by Ms Liana Allan and Mr Christopher Levingston on the Migration Alliance Incorporated website and Twitter feed. The blog posts and Tweets, in the first instance, concerned the content of a lecture given by Ms Duncan to a class of students completing the ANU visa course 8168 at UTS on 29 March 2015. Subsequent blog posts and Tweets related to Ms Duncan's rebuttal of the initial publications.

The blog posts and Tweets have since been removed by us and we do not wish to "reignite the fire" by restating here, in any detail, the contents of those blog posts and Tweets.

While we based the comments we posted on what was reported to us by a student as having been said by Ms Duncan during the lecture, we accept that what we published went further than what we now understand Ms Duncan to have actually said. Further, we accept that we took Ms Duncan's words out of context and may have given them a meaning that was not intended by Ms Duncan. This, in turn, means we unfairly characterised Ms Duncan's subsequent rebuttal.

The exploitation of sc417 workers revealed by the ABC report this week put into the spotlight a shadow economy reliant on low-skilled workers which various governments of the day have refused to acknowledge.

“Officially, Australia only has a high-skilled migration programme (namely, the 457 visa), but in truth the Australian labour market is flooded with low-skilled temporary migrant workers on other visas”, state two academics in an opinion piece in The Age today.

There is a large underclass of workers in the agriculture and hospitality industries made up foreigners on various types of temporary visas including work/holiday visas, student visas and tourist visas. The numbers are not known but their plight is only talked about when media reports pierce the veil of secrecy behind which these vulnerable individuals work and are exploited.

“So how have we allowed this to happen? Successive Coalition and Labor governments have not only tolerated this unskilled migrant workforce, but have encouraged its growth,” state the opinion piece by Dr Joanna Howe and Associate Professor Alexander Reilly of the Adelaide Law School.

The academics propose that Australia introduce an official entry stream for low-skilled workers.