With tens of thousands of Chinese coming to Australia for business and tourism, the Trade minister has announced that Australia will introduce a three-year multiple entry visa for Chinese business travelers. Details of the visa are to be released shortly by DIBP.

Broad details of the visa were announced by Minister for Trade and Investment Andrew Rob, recently:

"Chinese business visitors will now be eligible to apply for a three year multiple entry visa, increasing the prospect of repeat visits to Australia, which would be warmly welcomed by our tourism sector...

"These changes will also support the government's ambitious trade and investment agenda and increase the opportunities to do business with China. Total Chinese investment in Australia grew more than eight-fold between 2002 and 2012, to 23 billion AU dollars (20 billion U.S. dollars) and we want to see stronger continued growth," Robb said.

Australia is accused of cracking down on poor immigrants whilst opening its arms to wealthy ones says the USA Today.

Countries around the world are lining up to attract the wealthy Chinese.

The USA Today reports that more than half of all Chinese multimillionaires have either left or plan to emigrate from China. It is apparently becoming a competitive business as more global suitors try and entice the wealthy Chinese, with speedy processing and relatively lenient criteria so long as the applicants can show them the money.

It’s no secret that the significant investor visa with its ‘888’ labelling was aimed at the Chinese. And it has hit the target. Chinese nationals now account for over 90% of the 545 applications.

The Irish Echo reports that there has been an increasing number of Irish illegals in Australia in recent years who have been located by DIBP and deported. But this is only a small part of a larger and growing problem.

The number of people living in Australia illegally is steadily increasing at a rate of about 5% per year or about 3000 people a year. As at 30 June 2013, DIBP statistics estimate that about 62,700 people were unlawfully living in Australia compared to 2010 when the figure was about 53,900.

Freelancer.com chief executive Matt Barrie has described a federal government report asserting there is no skills shortage in the information technology sector as “rubbish”, reports the Australian Financial Review.

In a scathing attack of the 2012-13 Skills Shortage report which concluded there is no shortage of seven specific types of IT workers, including analyst programmers, developer programmers and software engineers, Mr Barrie asserts that the report is misleading

““What they’re talking about are technician level jobs, literally IT tech support roles. They’re not talking about software engineering or the real jobs that you need in a modern technology company,” he said.

“I would like someone to explain what the difference between ‘developer programmer’ and ‘software engineer’ is, because being an adjunct associate professor in the space and having hired hundreds of people in the industry I have no idea.

In concluding that no reasonable tribunal would have refused the adjournment request the primary judge found, the Tribunal’s decision that the Applicant should not be able to submit test results corrected following a re-mark “lacked an evident and intelligible justification”.

The Federal Courts have held that the Tribunals refusal to grant a short adjournment was unreasonable and stressed that it is critical that Tribunals act reasonably when reviewing cases.

The decision came in a case where the applicant requested from the Tribunal an adjournment to seek a review and re-mark of the applicant’s IELTs score. The applicant who failed several times to achieve the English proficiency standard for a sc485 application was also at the same time scheduled to sit several more IELTs tests.

However, the Tribunal decided to proceed to make its decision because it formed the view the applicant has had a reasonable period of time to obtain evidence of competent English – he made his visa application in June 2010 and had sat the IELTS test several times.

The Federal Court however referred to the High Court’s decision in Minister for Immigration and Citizenship v Li (2013) 297 ALR 225; [2013] HCA 18 (Li) and noted that there is a presumption of law that Parliament intends an exercise of power to be reasonable.