Hello everyone!

So, Australia has a new Prime Minister. What now?

Federal Elections

Anthony Albanese is the new Australia’s Prime Minister, having defeated the previous incumbent Scott Morrison in the Federal Election held on last Saturday, 21/05/2022. Although this newsletter does not have the intention to get involved in politics, immigration policy is always a concern, and in this sense, migrants have a lot to celebrate!

While the previous governments had stated that they would not reform the migrant cap until that limit had been reached, showing a complete disconnection from the reality (the 2020-21 Migration Program report confirmed that the total permanent Migration Program outcome for 2020–21 was 160,052 places), the new government appears to be concerned in reforming the immigration system to stop Australia becoming a ‘guest worker nation’, favouring permanent over temporary visa pathways to skilled workers.

Mr Albanese recently stated that “If you have people who are coming here temporarily, year after year, spending month after month here, why don’t we give them a bit of certainty and allow people to stay who are contributing to the country?”. That sounds like music to my ears!

WA State Nomination program 2022-23

While most of the states and territories are closing their migration programs for 2021-22 due to exhausting their migration capacity for this financial year, Western Australia is the first state to announce its program for 2022-23.

After being the most benefited state in the last Federal Budget, having increased the migration quota by 121%, WA has announced that they will also consider inviting people residing overseas for their 3,190 migration places (190 and 491 combined), of course maintaining the ranking system which gives preference for people living in WA, followed by people living in other Australian states or territories.

The 2022-23 WA state nomination program year will also expand the Graduate occupation list to include over 300 occupations! A combined occupation list has been published to provide a clearer picture of the eligibility of each occupation under the three streams of the program, go check it out to see if your occupation is one of them.

That’s all for now, folks!

See you next time!