Carrington Clarke

Why is it failing?

There's obviously been a debate as well about whether or not part of what universities have been selling

is not just about education, but it's a pathway to visas.

Did your research go into that?

And do you have a firm view on whether or not that is the case?

And is that a good or a bad thing?

Okay, so you did look at potential or you've been thinking about potential solutions to this problem.

If it is the case that students studying in Australia aren't doing as well as people studying overseas and you're trying to kind of unpick that relationship, I guess, regarding migration and the higher education system, what would you do to change the way that visas, working visas, are allocated in order to ensure that you're getting the right migrants when you're looking at kind of economic prosperity?

And this is that people who have these qualifications, if they're qualified as a doctor, they're qualified as a nurse, they are going to find it quite easy to find a job in that industry where there is a lot of occupations.

And one of the ones that was striking to me was

engineers and accountants, there's actually a very low percentage, is that right, of people who have this qualification who actually then work in those occupations?

You're talking about people who've come over here, businesses wanted to hire somebody from overseas, they've got the skillset that they need, that has a very high rate of obviously them working in that job versus other types of visas?

There's a debate currently about, for example, construction workers, that we need to have a higher percentage of our migrant program bringing over construction workers.

But you make the point that migrants granted visas for low-income occupations are much less likely to work in those occupations after migration.

And so you do need to be careful about trying to address short-term labor challenges through a point system, and instead it's better to be looking at wage rises, et cetera.

Is that right?

Are you optimistic that there can be changes made relatively easily to get more from the system?

The first option is this reform of the points test, but there is a second option that you looked into.

So Peter, I guess taking a step back, why do we care about the economic impact of the skilled migration program?

I'm going to ask you about some breaking news, and I know you haven't had time to be fully up across the detail, but you also appeared, is that right, at the Senate inquiry on Monday regarding the government's changes to the CGT tax discount?