Setting the scene…
This website, and the report on which it is based, document the ongoing and significant harm that has been done to unemployed, underemployed and displaced engineers in Australia through the deliberate oversupply of the engineering labour market. Mention has also been made of the similar harm done to Australian ICT professionals and accountants. The harm has been inflicted by the political establishment – principally the Federal Government and its bureaucracy. Vested interests including Engineers Australia and the Australian Council of Engineering Deans (ACED), representing the engineering establishment, are avid supporters of the Federal Government’s actions. We know the external motivations for this behaviour. For the Federal Government, oversupplying the engineering labour market with migrant engineers is simply an easy way for it to contribute to its enormous annual immigration targets. Engineers, along with accountants and ICT professionals, are hugely over-represented in the skilled migration program. These three professions are targeted because they are non-unionised, and they are not part of the key constituencies of the major political parties. The peak bodies representing these professions make millions of dollars each year out of doing skills assessments for migrants, and they have demonstrated year after year that the maintenance of these revenue streams is their priority. They care little for the well-being and employment prospects of their constituents. In relation to the engineering profession, this behavior by the political establishment has been going on since 2012-13. The engineering establishment has thrown its weight behind the Government’s approach during the last couple of years as the oversupply of engineers has transitioned from being bad to severe. Why? This raises the important question of why the wellbeing, employment prospects and financial security of Australian engineers and other professionals count for nothing with these establishment groups. Why does the concept of protecting and advancing the interests of its constituents hold no weight with the establishment? Australian engineering professionals are not just citizens but also voters, yet they are deliberately harmed by their own Government. Many unemployed, underemployed and displaced Australian engineers pay annual membership fees to Engineers Australia, while at the same time this organisation actively campaigns to maintain a huge oversupply of the engineering labour market through the Government’s skilled migration program. The members of ACED are paid out of the public purse, yet they have shown they have no interest in advancing the job prospects of the young Australians who have graduated from their universities – the children of the taxpayers who have contributed to their hefty salaries. Like Engineers Australia, ACED advocates that all engineering occupations should remain on the Medium and Long-term Strategic Skills List (MLTSSL) and therefore be open for skilled migration, despite the supply:demand ratio for engineering occupations being at all-time highs over the last several years. No victims are immediately obvious To make a start in understanding the behavior of the people who are part of the political and engineering establishments, we can turn to the monograph by John Darley (1996), who summarised the research into how organisations socialise individuals into causing harm to others. Darley observed that “Since a good many of the forces that cause people to avoid doing harm to others rely on the salient presence of specific or specifically imagined victims, if such victims are not present then restraining forces are considerably weakened” (Darley 1996, p.23). The politicians and bureaucrats who have made the successive decisions to swamp the engineering labour market each year since 2012-13 would rarely, if ever, encounter an engineering jobseeker. Engineers Australia, the self-proclaimed “trusted voice of the engineering profession”, has deliberately cultivated a relationship with the Department of Immigration and Border Protection over recent years, thereby becoming the “salient presence” whose views are listened to. The members of ACED don’t have to see or deal with the distress of graduate engineering jobseekers, because once the student engineers graduate and are seeking to enter the workforce, they are no longer enrolled in universities. Law of similarity Another factor at play is the well-known psychological law of similarity. People prefer the company of others who are similar to themselves, and are more likely to share, and be influenced by, the views of those who are similar to themselves. Engaging with others of like mind reinforces and validates existing views, even if those views are contrary to the available evidence. Politicians and bureaucrats who live and work in their bubble in Canberra plan their actions with reference to themselves, with the approval other like-minded establishment figures such as those from Engineers Australia (also headquartered in Canberra). Engineers Australia hosts the ACED website. It is in this way that groupthink becomes entrenched. On the rare occasions that alternative views are expressed, they are dismissed by the establishment group members who all agree with each other for their own self-interested reasons. Power over others A subset of people who have positions in the establishment do not find personal satisfaction through serving their constituents, but rather through the exercise of power. They enjoy having control over others, just for its own sake. Another overlapping subset has a ‘born-to-rule’ mentality arising from a sense of entitlement, that leads them to believe they have a right to exercise power as they see fit. Both these mindsets can lead to the misuse of power. In the absence of publicly available alternative explanations, I view the following outcome as an example of the misuse of power. In April 2017, the Federal Government announced a range of changes to the skilled migration program. One of them was the removal of six of the most heavily oversupplied engineering occupations from the list of those available for employer and State and Territory Government nominated visas. The other 15 engineering occupations in ANZSCO Minor Group ‘233 Engineering Professionals’ were still on the list. This change would not have made a large reduction in the number of engineers in the six occupations who were able to migrate, but it was at least some acknowledgment of the disastrous state of oversupply of the engineering labour market. Following the announcement, vested interests went into a frenzy of lobbying in the hope of reversing any changes that affected them. Also during this time, both the Minister for Immigration and Border Protection and the Ministerial Advisory Committee on Skilled Migration were made aware of this website and the report upon which it is based. When the latest version of the MLTSSL was announced on 1st July 2017, the six above-mentioned engineering occupations were back on the list for employer and State and Territory Government nominated visas. Not only that, these six – plus one other – now no longer require market testing (ie. advertising the job in Australia) before an employer nominated 457 visa can be granted to a migrant engineer. The other 15 engineering occupations still require market testing for 457 visas. This outcome has taken no account of Australian jobseekers in these six hugely oversupplied engineering occupations. The Government has acted in a biased fashion to appease the vested interests, and perhaps in a vindictive fashion in the face of evidence-based criticism of its corrupt skilled migration policies. The Government has exercised power in this way not because it is the right thing to do, but because it can. Ignorance One consequence of the combination of the above three factors is that members of the establishment may consciously or unconsciously screen out valid information and perspectives that do not fit with the views they currently hold. And these people might be tied to their existing views because of secondary factors that provide advantages, such as financial benefits. In my opinion, the revenue-generating migrant skills assessments done by Engineers Australia fit neatly into the category of secondary factors. Sometimes ignorance is present simply due to a lack of research or learning about a subject. Wrong conclusions can drawn by people in the establishment because they have not invested enough effort to understand the subject matter. In February 2017, a member of ACED wrote in a major daily newspaper that: “There are just not enough students graduating in engineering at Australian universities to meet domestic demand.” This statement is just plain wrong. As I documented in Table 12 in my report, a relatively low percentage of domestic engineering graduates can find full-time work in an engineering, scientific, technical or management role. The numbers range from 42% for aeronautical engineering at the low end, to 71% for electronic/computer engineering at the high end. Perusal of the well-known Graduate Destinations Report would have revealed this information to the author of the newspaper article. Thousands of international engineering students also graduate each year from Australian universities and compete with Australian graduates for a limited number of engineering positions. The supply of engineering graduates far outstrips market demand. Lack of internal and external restraints In Australia, at the federal level we have a political duopoly. The Coalition and the Labor Party are like two snakes coiled around each other, each trying to get its head above the other to be in top position by the time the next election comes around. The obsession with each other often blinds the major political parties to the needs of their constituents. The only restraint on this self-obsessed behavior is adverse media coverage. For the professions that have been targeted for oversupply by the Government, adverse media coverage of the Government’s actions is rare because the vested interests such as the peak professional bodies also support the oversupply. There are no immediate (or even long term) consequences for corrupt behavior. The Government makes no effort to do what is right; it does what it thinks it can get away with. Engineers Australia operates under a Royal Charter. There is nothing in this Charter which requires the organisation to consider the wellbeing and job prospects of its fee-paying members, or of the broader Australian engineering community. The administrative arm of the organisation, funded by the members, maintains an environment where the ‘profession’ is all about policies, procedures, standards, assessments, reports, awards and status. It doesn’t cross the minds of these people that the profession is also about people – those engineers who are practicing as engineers, and those who are endeavouring to enter or return to the profession. This approach wasn’t so much of a problem in past decades when the immigration of engineers was at levels that didn’t contribute to a massive oversupply of the labour market. But it is a problem now. In spite of the genuine harm being done to unemployed, underemployed and displaced engineers, the engineering establishment perpetuates its debased view that the ‘profession’ is an abstract concept where the interests of the people in the profession don’t need to be considered. This allows Engineers Australia to pursue millions of dollars in revenues from immigration assessments by advocating for high levels of engineering immigration in a labour market where record numbers of engineers are competing for each job. There will be no possibility of restraint on this behaviour until the members of Engineers Australia understand fully how this peak body has helped to harm the prospects of engineering jobseekers in this country. ACED uses the veneer of institutional reputations and professional titles to give weight to its support for ongoing engineering immigration in a hugely oversupplied labour market. Its submission to the review of the Skilled Occupation List (now MLTSSL) in 2016 was based on virtually no research or understanding of the issues affecting the engineering labour market. Unfortunately, university titles give an air of authority to views which lack substance. Once again, short of adverse media publicity, there is no restraint on this behaviour because those who are most adversely and most immediately affected by ACED’s advocacy are no longer part of the university system. Outcome The above five factors have combined so that the political and engineering establishments are aligned in pursuit of their unethical immigration goals, which run completely counter to the interests and wellbeing of both Australian and recent migrant engineering jobseekers. This is overlaid on the general skilled migration program which is corrupt to the core, and which places many Australian jobseekers at a disadvantage. In my view, the Australian engineering profession – ie. the community of practicing engineers and those seeking to practice in the profession – has been betrayed by the political and engineering establishments. This is why, in the last paragraph of my report The Deliberate and Sustained Oversupply of the Engineering Labour Market by the Australian Federal Government: 2012-13 onwards, I said that the Australian engineering profession is at the lowest point in its history. And I emphasise again: the policies, practices and attitudes that have contributed to this disaster will not go unchallenged. Darley J M, 1996, ‘How Organizations Socialize Individuals into Evildoing’, in Codes of Conduct: Behavioral Research into Business Ethics, Russel Sage Foundation, New York.
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Following the release of the skilled occupation lists for the skilled migration program (see post of 8th July 2017 in the ‘News’ page), we are now into the fifth year of the deliberate oversupply of the Australian engineering labour market. The Federal Government has planned and implemented the oversupply of engineers for two main reasons:
The Federal Government has been able to implement this ongoing oversupply of specific professional groups because the skilled migration program is fundamentally corrupt. It is designed to maximise the number of skilled migrants that can enter the country each year, often with little regard for the prevailing market conditions for the occupations in which the migrants will seek work. For skilled occupations on the Medium and Long-term Strategic Skills List (MLTSSL), current market conditions are accorded no relevance by the Government. The Department of Education and Training determines eligibility of occupations for listing on the MLTSSL based on whimsical projections of occupational demand in 5-10 years’ time. To justify bringing in migrants now to satisfy some presumed market demand 5-10 years into the future, this Department invokes its ludicrous ‘stockpiling theory’, whereby skilled migrants (or the Australian professionals they displace from the workforce) are presumed to be available to fill jobs this far into the future, even if they are unable to find employment in their occupation in the intervening period. The bizarre nature of the logic of the ‘stockpiling theory’ is apparent for occupations which are currently severely oversupplied (such as engineering occupations). Individuals who cannot find employment in their skilled occupation now due to the intense competition for a limited number of jobs, will not be selected by employers in the event of a market upturn in 5-10 years' time. At that future time, employers will demand candidates with much more recent experience and professional development. And where will they find them? At least partly in the subsequent annual skilled migration intake, of course. The extent of the corruption of the skilled migration program is detailed on the ‘Corruption’ page on this website. The corruption reflects the contempt the Federal Government has for Australian skilled jobseekers, and the desperate desire it has to jam as many skilled migrants as it can into a subdued and limited Australian jobs market. This attitude has in turn emboldened the vested interests to push even harder for more skilled migration, from which they source either lucrative revenue streams or cheaper labour. The use of immigration policy to deliberately oversupply the labour markets for engineers, ICT professionals and accountants has caused enormous harm to jobseekers in these professions. Experienced professionals, graduates and recent migrants who have been trying to find suitable positions in their profession have to compete with wave after wave of new jobseekers admitted through each annual migration intake. In engineering, where job vacancies are relatively few and the number of applicants for each vacancy is at a record high, migrant engineers continue to be granted visas in resource-boom numbers. This has entrenched unemployment, underemployment and displacement from the profession for Australian and migrant engineers alike. For the tens of thousands of professionals affected in this way, the financial and career consequences are serious. Those who cannot find work in their occupation frequently end up in lower-skilled, lower-paid jobs. Their ability to fund their financial obligations and save for the future is diminished. For those who are unemployed, normal participation in society is often curtailed through lack of finances and, eventually, lack of confidence and hope. For Australian professionals struggling to find work in oversupplied labour markets where there are limited job opportunities (such as engineering), the harm caused by the Government is more than financial or career-related. The Government has devalued and degraded the citizenship of these professionals by deliberately curtailing their chances of success in the crucial task of finding appropriate work in their own country. The Government does this by allowing large numbers of new migrants – who are not citizens of this country – to have equal access to the labour market, even when the labour market is in a dire condition. This is not in any way the fault of migrants, who have done nothing wrong. This is the fault of the Federal Government’s corrupt skilled migration policies. In seeking to impose its unethical immigration agenda on the Australian skilled labour market, the Government has wielded immigration policy in the same way as a cave troll wields a bludgeon. It clears the path to its objectives without regard to the harm it causes, and with no consideration for the people it harms. In this way the Federal Government has used, and continues to use, skilled migration policy as a weapon against a group of its own citizens. |
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