Australian government removes journalism from Skilled Occupation List

Journalism no longer features on a list of occupations used by the Australian government to control which migrant workers can seek permanent residency in the country.

The new Skilled Occupation List (SOL), which was compiled independent body Skills Australia on behalf of the government's Department of Immigration and Citizenship, cuts the number of "highly valued occupations" from 400 to 181.

Journalists are still eligible for permanent visas under the separate Employer Nomination Scheme Occupation List (ENSOL), which allows Australian employer's to sponsor overseas workers. But the new list will mean journalists will be unable to obtain a visa under the country's general migration scheme, which is "for people who are not sponsored by an employer and who have skills in particular occupations required in Australia".

The new SOL will come into effect from 1 July and will be reviewed annually, but is expected "to remain stable for some time", the department says in its new guidelines.

According to the new guidelines: "The introduction of a new list of occupations is part of a package of proposed reforms that reflects the government's commitment to a labour market demand-driven skilled migration program. The number of places available to independent skilled migrants in the skilled migration program is expected to fall as the number of places available for employer-sponsored skilled migrants increases. Employer-sponsored migration matches migrants directly to jobs in Australia, making it the best method to ensure the labour market gets the skills it needs now. It is therefore important that the smaller number of independent skilled migration places that are available are filled by migrants with skills that are critical to Australia's economic development in the medium to long term. The new list of occupations identifies these skills."

The reduction in occupations and removal of journalists from the SOL is a fair reflection of the "the times we are living in and the state of the news industry", Jonathan Este, director of communications with the Australian journalists union, the Media Entertainment & Arts Alliance, told Journalism.co.uk.

"The fact is that there are plenty of Australian journalists looking for jobs and plenty more in education who will be entering the employment market during the next few years. It is hard to imagine a situation in which we would need to bring in a journalist, even for a specialist or non-English language publication," he said.

Journalists and related professions, print journalists, television journalists and radio journalists were previously listed separately on the SOL. According to a report by the Australian Associated Press agency, the government is cracking down on the number of people seeking permanent residency through "low-value education courses", such as short, vocational courses in hairdressing and cooking, who have secured residency with relative ease after entering the country for these training programmes.

"It's true that Australia is hardly wanting for more out-of-work journalists, but I think the bigger picture here is that the government is treating a symptom rather than a cause: people couldn't "exploit" these "low-value education courses" if the government didn’t allow them to exist in the first place. Australia’s education industry is rife with shonky "training colleges" offering worthless qualifications to unsuspecting foreign students. But it's a AUS$15 billion-industry, and fee-paying overseas students effectively fund our tertiary education system, so the government has allowed it to flourish," Ruth Brown, web editor at Australian news and comment website Crikey, told Journalism.co.uk.

"Whether it will affect the Australian journalism industry, I couldn't say with any authority. However, Australia is very multicultural society, and part of that is a strong tradition of foreign language media outlets. This could potentially affect news organisations like Melbourne paper Neos Kosmos - Melbourne has the largest Greek-speaking population outside of Greece, and the paper is an important part of the Greek community here."

People who have already applied for visas under the general skilled migration program will not be affected by the implementation of the new list.

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