Billionaire entrepreneur Scott Farquhar is calling for visa reforms in the Australian immigration system which could benefit Indian applicants.
The co-founder of tech company Atlassian is advocating for a special visa focused on jobs that are crucial to Australian companies to boost the country’s exports.
Mr Farquhar – a member of the government- appointed Innovation and Science Australia Board- said the government’s visa changes announced last year were harming the technology companies.
In the changes announced to employer-sponsored visas, the government purged over 200 skills from the list of occupations that companies could access in order to bring overseas workers to Australia, and removed the pathway to permanent residency for many others.
Mr Farquhar’s software development company employs 2,300 people – nearly half of them outside Australia.
"Atlassian is now at a point where half of our global workforce is outside Australia, but we'd have a much bigger scale in Sydney if we could find the right people or bring them here," quoted him as saying.
He said a separate class for skilled visas for industries that have export potential should be introduced while the outflow of skilled Australian graduates has remained strong.
India is a source of a large number of software and application developers, ICT Engineers and ICT managers working in Australia.
Navjot Singh Kailay is a migration agent in Melbourne. He says a special visa for IT professionals will benefit Indian skilled visa applicants.
“Currently, they [IT professionals] have to compete in the existing visa category where there’s a massive rush of applications which is pushing the merit threshold higher, making it increasingly difficult for them to get permanent residency,” Mr Kailay tells SBS Punjabi.
He believes the provision of an easy pathway to permanent residency will be a huge draw for the highly qualified Indian IT professionals many of whom find the US a more attractive destination.
According to the Department of Home Affairs data, a total of 6,882 software and application developers were granted visas under the employer-sponsored temporary migration and points tested permanent skilled migration in 2014-15 up from 5962 the previous years.
ICT business and system analysts, ICT support and test engineers and ICT managers combined bagged 3,608 visas in 2014-15 and 3,226 during the previous year.
