Today (10 September 2014), the review report, Robust New Foundations: A Streamlined, Transparent and Responsive System for the 457 Programme, was released and is available on the Department of Immigration
and Border Protection’s website.
There are 22 recommendations made (and in time we will see which are adopted), but the report identified the core questions as:
“…Our view is that an overarching principle of the 457 programme must be credibility – so as to ensure its continued success, the 457 programme must have legitimacy in the eyes of the Australian public as something that benefits Australia rather than does harm. The 457 programme will only be able to attain this necessary credibility when the Australian public can clearly see that policy problems are being resolved by robust evidenced based solutions.
There are two policy issues that we consider to be core questions in the existing 457 programme, as they directly address one of the two objectives. These are: proving that the position cannot be filled by a local worker and determining the skilled occupations that are used for the programme. It is our considered view that these issues are not well served by the current policy approaches and can be improved by adopting a more robust evidence- based approach”
