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September 7, 2011 – As Queensland and Western Australia’s booming resources industry, with its billions of dollars worth of new LNG and mining projects continuing to come online, Australia has now continued to suffer a critical skills crisis.

With larger projects continue to be hampered by sever labor shortages, the Australian government has announced last May 10, 2011 of the implementation of Enterprise Migration Agreements (EMAs).

The National Resources Sector Employment Taskforce, convened in late 2009 to help address the need for more than 70 000 skilled workers on major resources projects over the next five years, has noted that Australian migration is one tool for meeting Australia’s future skills needs and thus recommended last July 2010 the introduction of EMAs.

What are EMAs?

Enterprise Migration Agreements (EMAs) are a new temporary immigration to Australia initiative that is designed to help address the skill needs of the resources sector. They are a custom-designed, project-wide migration arrangement for large scale resource projects that will help ensure peak workforce needs are met, easing capacity constraints and ensuring economic and employment benefits are realized by allowing major resource projects to access overseas labor for genuine skill vacancies.

How does EMAs work?

EMAs are available to resource projects which have been approved by the relevant state or territory government with capital expenditure of more than $2 billion and with a peak workforce of more than 1500 workers.

The EMA will set the terms which include the occupations, qualifications, English language skills, wages and conditions of the foreign workers on the project. These terms will be followed by the overseas workers who will be engaged on the project as well as outline training commitments that must be met by the project.

The EMAs will make sure that skill shortages will not be able to put constraints on major resource projects that could jeopardize Australian jobs.

The Controversy

Just recently, as more details were revealed with regards to how the new Australian visa scheme will work, the recently released Australian Emergency Migration Agreements (EMAs) has triggered a controversy.

The newly more detailed release of the new Australian visas scheme has driven critics to censure against it as they discovered that this new Australia visa scheme will cause to overlook the hiring of local workforce in favor of hiring new skilled workers immigrating to Australia.

As under the EMAs, the government plans to work with employers to bring in temporary skilled workers from overseas to fill the gaps in the labor market driven by the country’s resource boom.

Critics asserted that this new scheme would negatively result as it will cause in local workers being overlooked.

However, Peter Speldewinde from the Australian Department of Immigration and Citizenship (DIAC) has refuted the critics, saying that the new visa Australia scheme is not intended to encourage employers to bypass local workers in favor of migrants as hiring overseas workers will relatively be more expensive than the equivalent Australian worker.

source:
visabureau.com