A New Zealand advocacy group in Australia claims it has obtained some 40,000 signatures on a petition it will present to the Australian Parliament next week calling for New Zealanders to be given the same rights as other permanent residents residing in Australia, according to a Radio New Zealand report.

Last year, thousands of New Zealanders marched through Australian cities demanding equal rights after a series of media stories engaged in Kiwi bashing’ with some titles screaming, “JOBLESS Kiwis are flocking to Australia in search of work - and demanding the dole.” This year the New Zealand advocacy group, Oz Kiwi is aiming to put pressure directly on the Australian government to allow New Zealanders living permanently in Australia to naturalise within a designated time period so they can vote.

Spokesperson Timothy Gassin said the OZ Kiwi proposal was simple: that New Zealanders who move to Australia, who have been self sufficient and pay tax, should be given the full rights of other Australian residents and be allowed the option of becoming an Australian citizen.

Mr Gassin told Radio New Zealand that Oz Kiwi would meet with senators and parliamentarians this week to present their concerns and the petition which he claims has some 40,000 signatures.

Currently New Zealanders with a clean criminal record can enter, live and work indefinitely in Australia on a sc444 visa, which is granted automatically when they arrive. There are about 650,000 New Zealanders living in Australia on the Special Category Visa. An estimated 200,000 of these Kiwis are subject to the 2001 restrictions which deny New Zealanders a range of entitlements including welfare and various forms of government assistance from education and healthcare to disaster relief.

Immigration numbers are too high, straining Sydney and Melbourne’s infrastructure and pushing up house prices beyond the reach of average Australians, former NSW Labor premier Bob Carr recently told The Australian.

“If you jam more people into Sydney, then they will get spikes in land and housing prices. We are stoking demand,’’ he said.

Are the estimated 50,000 foreign settlers a year in NSW responsible for the doubling of house prices in Sydney since about early 2000? The population of NSW is close to 6 million.

Private education providers are set to face tougher regulations as the Department of Education sets out reviewing the legislative framework around foreign student compliance, according to a report in The Australian.

The review is linked to investigations by the Overseas Students Ombudsman which has warned private education providers of a systemic problem of non-compliance that is severely damaging the reputation of Australia’s education sector.

Sloppy student services and false attendance reporting are systemic problems plaguing overseas students at private education providers, the national Overseas Students Ombudsman has revealed.

In an ‘issues paper’ on poor compliance in the private education sector, the Ombudsman revealed that it investigated some 448 student complaints since the body's establishment in 2011. The Ombudsman had to intervene in 142 cases in order to prevent DIBP from sending students home. 

“It warned some providers were failing to intervene with at-risk students, allowing weak students to continue to study and fail.Student absences were also being miscalculated. Providers were marking students absent when they were merely late, or on days when it was a public holiday and there were no classes scheduled” noted the report in The Australian.

Students suffer the consequences of these inefficiencies as DIBP normally reacts by cancelling their visas if the issues it becomes aware of are not addressed properly.

Under the 457 visa program over the last year, 104,780 foreign skilled workers were hired. This is less than 1 per cent of Australia’s workforce of some 11.5 million. Despite the small proportion of foreign workers in the workforce, the Labor party is once again ramping up warning of ‘rorts’ in the program and claiming that it undermines jobs and wages in Australia.

The number of people on the 457 skilled worker visa fell to 104,780 at the end of May, down 6.3 per cent since last July, according to DIBP statistics reported recently in The Australian.

Given this, the government as well as the Migration Council of Australia (MCA) says that the program is working as it should: “The 457 program is performing well and the measures to tighten regulation and compliance are working,” said MCA chief executive Carla Wilshire.

 “While there will always be a small portion of employers who do the wrong thing, the continued focus on rorts in the 457 program is disproportionate. By and large, this program works well and serves Australia’s interests well” she said.

Latest DIBP figures revealed in The Australian indicate that the number of employers sanctioned over the year was higher, at 15 per cent. But the government said the sanctions include ‘minor ­administrative problems’. The government targeted some 4000 sponsors over the year but only issued about 40 infringement notices.

It has been over a year since the department of immigration signed an MOU to include Greece in the work and holiday visa (SC462) program. However, the implementation of the program has stalled for some unkown reason.

DIBP is clearly having some issues with some countries in finalising the work and holiday program. A note on the DIBP website states as follows: “The Work and Holiday arrangement with…Vietnam, Israel, Greece and Papua New Guinea will not come in to effect until start dates have been agreed.”

It’s been over a year since Australia and Greece signed an MOU to allow 500 visas to be made available under the sc462 work and holiday visa programme.  Under the program young people aged 18 to 30 from Greece would be eligible to apply for the sc462 visa with similar arrangements for young Australian to work in Greece.

DIBP has provided no explanation for the delay in the implementation of the program which normaly takes about 6 months from the signing of the MOU to come into effect.

Perhaps the estimated A$480 billion Greek debt has got something to do with it. Things are so bad in Greece that some media reports state the people cannot withdraw more than 300Euros a day from Greek banks to prevent a run on the banks. Furthermore, it would seem unlikely that the Greek public would accept any government move to allow foreigners – even if its just 500 – to come work in a struggling economy.