Carrington Clarke

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?

Yep, that's correct.

The government has announced some pretty major changes.

This seems to be in response to some of the backlash we have seen.

So Treasurer Jim Chalmers says that they will lift the threshold for small businesses to access the 50% CGT discount up to $10 million, the revenue from the small business, I should say.

which they say will now mean that 98% of all active businesses will be eligible for the concessions.

There have also been some changes to the testamentary trusts, and they are still doing consultation both on them and on startups.

Now, there are lots of details to this, but effectively the government is carving out pieces.

There did seem to be a bit of an argument in part between economists.

Many economists wanted to leave the system as is.

They didn't want

to see more carve-outs, a rather kind of pure system, whereas a lot of business groups were saying that this could be very problematic for startups in particular, but businesses more broadly.