The DIBP's Procedures Advice Manual (PAMs) have been changed and the policy is now as follows:

46.5 Training benchmark A - industry training fund

Industry training funds are statutory authorities responsible for providing funding for training of eligible workers in certain industries. For example, some State/Territory governments have construction industry training funds established by Acts of Parliament to support the training of eligible persons in the building and construction industry such as the ACT Building and Construction Industry Training Fund that is administered under the Building and Construction Industry Training Levy Act 1999. These training funds generally source revenue through levies from businesses operating in that industry. Industry training funds operate in a range of sectors including construction and mining but are not limited to these industries. Immigration has no authority to register or establish industry training funds.

Migration Alliance member Svetlana Gunaratne has arranged an event for all RMA women in Australia.

The details for our International Women's Day RMA event are below:

Location: Infusion’s Cammeray

Migration Alliance has permission to publish this news from Mr Steve Ingram.

As of Monday this week Mr Ingram is working for Immigration Minister, Peter Dutton MP.  

I am meeting with the Office of the MARA this Friday to determine who the next CEO is or will be, and to find out more details on 'who is going to do what' at OMARA from this point onwards.

Over 200 bikies, foreign criminals, including suspected members or associates of bikie gangs, drug traffickers and sex offenders have had their visas cancelled in the past three months and have started being deported from Australia.

The number of cancellations is much higher than in recent years, because Immigration Minister Peter Dutton now has greater powers to revoke visas of convicted criminals. Since December last year, 203 visas have been cancelled, a high rate of cancellations compared to 372 revocations between July 2011 and July 2014, according to a report on the ABC.

Mr Dutton said he would not apologise for taking a tough approach.

"Frankly they're detracting from the Australian society, not adding to it.They should be removed from our shores as quickly as possible,” he said.

Of the 203 people who have had their visas cancelled since mid-December last year, 92 are living in immigration detention centres. Another 99 are serving sentences in prison and 12 have already been deported.

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.