While Prime Minister Tony Abbot’s much trumpeted ‘security statement’ has stressed on plans to impose tougher citizenship laws, it provided little by way of detail. The head of the immigration department, Michael Pezzullo however told a senate committee yesterday that his department is restructuring its visa decision making process to ‘empower our officers to say no more often, where circumstances warrant”.

What remains puzzling, in all this is the continued failure of policy-makers to flag that unregistered migration practice needs to at least be looked at in this paradigm shift in Australian migration policy.

Warning of a ‘new dark age’ the Prime Minister indicated that the increasing threat from home-grown extremists required major changes to both security and immigration policies. While much of his speech focussed on why the measures were needed, he did not provide specific details of what they would be, save as to the appointment of a national counterterrorism coordinator and a ban on vilification and hate speech.

The immigration department’s chief, Michael Pezzullo however did not mince his words when he told a senate committee yesterday that his department needs to re-examine how it makes visa grant decisions, to make sure that his officers are making the right decisions which balance the need to welcome legitimate travellers with a need to protect the Australian community.

“I would like to make it abundantly clear to the committee that we want to empower our staff to make better informed decisions on visa and citizenship applications.

“We will empower our officers to say no more often, where circumstances warrant and within the law, through better use of information, intelligence and data analytics, as well as ensuring that our staff have the training and support to make defensible, adverse decisions,” said Mr Pezzullo.

This together with the ‘no benefit of the doubt’ rhetoric of the Prime Minister, must mean that visa applicants are set to face greater scrutiny with greater risk profiling on the agenda for applicants from certain parts of the world.

Employers hiring foreign workers will need to pay more attention to compliance obligations to avoid fines and/or losing their sponsorship rights. The Fair Work Ombudsman told the ABC that there has been ‘a spike’ in the underpayment of foreign workers in recent years.

Recovering $23 million last year from employers underpaying workers is only the tip of the iceberg, according to a report on the ABC. Thousands of workers, including Australians, are being underpaid wages or denied entitlements by their Australian employers, the ABC claims, with a rising number of complaints coming from overseas workers being denied their entitlements.

Cafes, restaurants and pubs, followed closely by construction, the retail trade and service industries including contract cleaning are listed among the main jobs where underpayment is rife. But it was the spike in complaints from overseas workers - including 457 visa holders - that prompted Fair Work Ombudsman Ms Natalie James to launch an investigation.

"One in 10 of our complaints are now coming from visa holders. That's significant and that is a trend that's on the up," she told the ABC.

In 2012, her office recouped $67,000 in underpaid entitlements for 77 visa holders. That skyrocketed the next year to $262,000. Last year $345,000 was recouped for 309 foreign workers. About 50 cases a year end up in court with the rest being resolved by the office of the Fair Work Ombudsman.

Concerns have emerged about a ‘security statement’ Australian PM Tony Abbot is expected to release next week, according to a report on the SBS. Queensland MP Teresa Gambaro has indicated that changes are brewing that could have significant impact on the Coalition government’s support for the immigration program and multiculturalism.

The former Assistant Minister for Immigration in the Howard government, MS Gambaro said in a statement to SBS that "while it seems clear that there have been very concerning failures of process and a lack of proper diligence with security checks, we should not let these failures of process lead us to question the strengths and benefits of our migration program or our success as a multicultural society.”

Prime Minister Tony Abbott has raised the Lindt Café as an example of where lax enforcement of bail rules allowed Man Haron Monis free on bail while facing serious charges.  

Mr Abbott has detailed the areas he wanted to examine in the context of the security statement.  

"It's clear to me, that for too long, we have given those who might be a threat to our country the benefit of the doubt,” he said in a recent statement. “There’s been the benefit of the doubt at our borders, the benefit of the doubt for residency, the benefit of the doubt for citizenship and the benefit of the doubt at Centrelink...And in the courts, there has been bail, when clearly there should have been jail.”

SBS survey of some some sectors of Australia's ethnic communities leadership indicates that they were concerned that the approach could undermine support for multiculturalism in Australia while Civil Liberties groups have raised their concerns about the Government’s plan to end the so called ‘benefit of the doubt’.

In NZ, backpackers get an extra three-month stay for three months of farm work. In Australia, they get an extra year’s stay for such an 88-day work stint. This incentive and farmers’ preference to backpackers over Pacific Islanders is undermining the seasonal worker program, a study by the World Bank and the Australian National University has found.

Australia's seasonal worker program (SWP) established in 2008 as a pilot, and then in 2012 as a permanent program, is aimed to help meet the labour needs in Australia’s horticultural sector and offer labour mobility opportunities to 2,500 Pacific islanders every year.

These workers who can stay here for between 3 and 6 months have to compete with  40,000 backpackers who complete farm stints to get an extra year’s work rights in Australia.

Report author Stephen Howes believes the ready supply of backpackers and financial and administrative burdens on growers using Pacific Islander labour, such as accommodation and private health insurance costs, contributes to the lower demand for seasonal workers, according to a report by the Australian Associated Press (AAP).

He notes that "Backpackers turn up at your door, you don't have to do anything," he told AAP.

However, Prof Howes said most producers surveyed preferred using Pacific Islanders as they believed they were more reliable and harder working.

If your suppliers are chasing you for paid invoices or if you are not receiving your instalment payments, then it may be possible that your computer may have been hacked by a syndicate now targeting Australian businesses.

The scam involves scammers pretending to be legitimate suppliers advising changes to payment arrangements. It may not be detected until the business is alerted by complaints from suppliers that payments were not received, says a report from the Australian consumer watchdog, the ACCC.

The agency has received reports from Australian businesses that a scam operating in the northern hemisphere has headed down under. Businesses trading overseas – particularly with companies in Asia – are at higher risk of being ripped off by these scams. The United States and Canadian Better Business Bureau and the Internet Crime Complaints Centre (IC3) have both issued warnings about this business compromise scam.

How these scams work

• Scammers hack into vendor and/or supplier email accounts and obtain information such as customer lists, bank details and previous invoices.
• Your business receives an email, supposedly from a vendor, requesting a wire transfer to a new or different bank account.
• The scammers either disguise their email address or create a new address that looks nearly identical. The emails may be spoofed by adding, removing, or subtly changing characters in the email address which makes it difficult to identify the scammer’s email from a legitimate address.
• The email may look to be from a genuine supplier and often copy a business’s logo and message format. It may also contain links to websites that are convincing fakes of the real company’s homepage or links to the real homepage itself.
• The scam email requests a change to usual billing arrangements and asks you to transfer money to a different account, usually by wire transfer.
• The scam may not be detected until the business is alerted by complaints from legitimate suppliers that they have not received payment.  

ACCCs recommendations on how you can protect yourself

• Make yours a ‘fraud-free’ business – effective management procedures can go a long way towards preventing scams. Have a clearly defined process for verifying and paying accounts and invoices.
• Consider a multi-person approval process for transactions over a certain dollar threshold.
• Ensure your staff are aware of this scam and understand how it works so they can identify it, avoid it and report it.
• Double check email addresses - scammers can create a new account which is very close to the real one; if you look closely you can usually spot the fake.
• DO NOT seek verification via email – you may be simply responding to the scammer’s email or scammers may have the capacity to intercept the email.
• If you think a request is suspicious, telephone the business to seek verification of the email’s authenticity.
• DO NOT call any telephone number listed in the email; instead, use contact details that you already have on file for the business, or that you have sourced independently – for example, from a telephone directory.
• DO NOT pay, give out or clarify any information about your business until you have looked into the matter further.
• Check your IT systems for viruses or malware - always keep your computer security up-to-date with anti-virus and anti-spyware software and a good firewall.