Dr. Peter Varela

At a high level,

you can make the statement that points-tested visas do well in some sections of the labour market, and they don't do particularly well in other sections of the labour market.

So they do well in health.

Doctors, nurses, allied health, all seem to do quite well with the...

the points tested program.

Now there's a lot of other occupations as well, but health is kind of a nice one to visualize.

Exactly.

And just to clarify for listeners, what we're actually doing, we're asking what people nominate on their visas.

So you have to nominate an occupation to get a visa.

And then we're looking later in the tax data, sort of five, 10 years later,

what proportion are working as engineers, what proportion are working as accountants.

And you're right, those sort of broadly white-collar professional jobs do better through the employer-sponsored pathway than the independent pathway.

Yeah, exactly.

There are some occupations that employer sponsored sort of linkage, that sort of essentially the business, the company sort of looks at you and says, that's the special skillset that we want.

You want to use that in some parts of the labor market and in other parts of the labor market, knowing that you have a degree, knowing that you have a qualification in the occupation works just as well.

So I think it's really just about tailoring the different types of visas to different parts of the labor market.

And again, this is something that with this data, with this sort of ability to measure these outcomes, we can kind of make these statements now in a way that it was much, much harder to do 10 years ago.

Exactly.

So there's a sort of standard line that we use that if your occupation can't retain non-migrant workers, if the wages and conditions aren't sufficiently attractive to retain non-migrant workers, it's probably also not going to be able to retain migrant workers.

And we sort of see empirically that