Australian Politics and Policy - Senior, 2019a

Australian Politics and Policy
Figure 3 Australia’s annual temporary immigration admissions by category, 1996–2018
(number of persons). Source: data from DHA 2018c; DHA 2018d; DHA 2018e; Phillips
2016; Phillips and Simon-Davies 2017, 3.
There have been claims that the temporary skilled program too readily overlooks
the availability of qualified local recruits and/or permits an undesirable
under-investment in the education and training that would support an upskilled
local workforce. 18 Responding in part to such misgivings, the rules governing the
temporary skilled program were significantly revised in April 2017, with the aim
of ensuring, according to Prime Minister Turnbull, that ‘temporary migration visas
are not a passport for foreigners to take up jobs that could and should be filled by
Australians’. 19
Multiculturalism
Immigration policies over the past few decades have mostly been characterised
by a reasonably firm, though occasionally unsteady, bipartisan support from the
two major party groupings of Labor and the Coalition. A similar combination
of substantial consensus interspersed by occasional vacillation has characterised
the ongoing acceptance of multiculturalism as the policy framework for managing
Australia’s immigration-driven ethnic diversity.
There has long been some ambiguity about the degree to which multiculturalism
has been intended to promote greater social cohesion and integration
18 Kell 2014.
19 Turnbull 2017.
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