Dr. Peter Varela

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165 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 18 Jun

Dr. Peter Varela’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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ABC Business Daily · Do skilled migrants help the economy? · 18 Jun 2026 podcast

low-paid occupations have much lower long-term retention rates than higher-paid occupations.

Now, I will have to sort of jump in there though and say, construction is typically not a low-paid occupation in the frameworks that we are using.

So, cooks and hairdressers are the sort of two occupations that we usually think of.

as historically having quite poor outcomes.

These are pulled across all of the years in the migration program.

We've had lots of cooks and hairdressers and not particularly a lot of them continue to work in those occupations.

The construction stuff is really hard because

Within construction, you have licensed trades and you have unlicensed trades.

And each of those sort of occupations has a different framework for determining who can work on a particular site.

Some of these are national level, but a lot of them are state level.

And so essentially, you need to think through very carefully which type of visa is going to make sense for these occupations.

And so yes.

Be careful using visas to solve labor market shortage in low-paid occupations.

But I think construction has a whole world of challenges that are special to that sector.

Oh, absolutely.

This points test reform is not a surprise.

It was sort of suggested in the 2023 review by Martin Parkinson.

There were discussion papers in 2024 that were released by Home Affairs.

There has been lots of discussions.

And to be honest, there's lots of different things

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