This 'Jobs and Skills' Summit is sending us straight back onto the Big Australia hamster wheel

Most of the purported migration "outcomes" are already onshore and merely doing a visa upgrade. Plus, over recent years, only a smallish proportion of them are principal applicants in the so-called Skilled Stream - and they don't even need to have scarce skills The remaining "outcomes" are nearly all Family Stream, or Skilled dependents.

What to do?

Advises SPA, cut out offshore (permanent) immigration via self-sponsorship or state-regional sponsorship. These sub-streams "serve more to suppress wages".

Second, contrary to some voices, SPA highlights the usefulness of the temporary skilled migration channel, ahead of the permanent.

Third, they'd restrict any skilled migration to directly employer-sponsored applicants. Then, limit any permanent "skill" visas to onshore applicants with proven employment records. (And why not? Again, most "permanents" are just landed temps upping their visas.)

These measures would not work unless the income threshold for temporary skilled migrants was jacked up. The current menial threshold of $53,900 should be "at least 10% greater than the median full-time wage". Today, that means about $90,000.

ACTU, too, supports raising the threshold. It's a no-brainer. But they oppose single-employer nominations. They support instead a skills agency to "verify" those so-called "skill shortages" for immigration.

Hey guys, that approach maybe worked, in simpler and less globalised labour markets of 40 years ago. Not now. Vested interests, whether employers or unions, will always capture the "official" shortage ratings.

When my own kids found positions in today's US and EU job markets, specific firms had to want and choose them. They themselves didn't get to pin their own tails on some "skill shortage" donkey, did they?

What else does SPA mention, as we're clambering back onto the Big Australia hamster wheel? Well, "business profits are up", with unseemly high shares of the economic pie going to capital not labour.

Why, asks SPA, would a nominally Labor Government choose this very moment to "sacrifice" worker bargaining power? My crass reply – Labor is an authoritarian and neoliberal party.

Their Issues Paper wheels out the usual Treasury narrative of the average migrant's heroic "lifetime" GDP contribution topping $2 million. As if we local folks can't achieve similar.