Australia tweaks student visa rules, check details

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison said visitors to Australia who enter on a student or a working holiday visa will get a rebate on their application fee. Morrison said he hoped the new arrivals would be able to help fill some of Australia's "critical workforce shortages," particularly in hospitality and agriculture.

Australian government has announced that it will give visa rebates to students and backpackers who wish to come to the country, in a bid to get them to fill a record number of job vacancies caused by the COVID pandemic. Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison said visitors to Australia who enter on a student or a working holiday visa will get a rebate on their application fee. Morrison said he hoped the new arrivals would be able to help fill some of Australia's "critical workforce shortages," particularly in hospitality and agriculture.

"My message to them is 'Come on down. Come on down now,'" Morrison said during a press conference. He said Australia was still well-positioned in terms of its Covid-19 response, with high vaccination rates and a low number of deaths compared to other western countries. "The crest of this Omicron wave is either upon us now or will come upon us in states over the next few weeks," he added.

It must be noted that Australia's economy has come under increasing pressure in recent months following a widespread outbreak of the Omicron Covid-19 variant. Workers made to isolate as a result of catching the virus have sparked supply shortages across the country, leaving some supermarket shelves empty. A number of food and logistics firms were reporting between 10 per cent and 50 per cent of their employees were away from work on any given day.

Before the latest Covid-19 outbreak, Australia's job vacancies climbed to a record high, up 18.5 per cent to almost 400,000 in the three months through November. The unemployment rate declined to 4.6 per cent in November after having risen in the previous two months.

Morrison did not lay out what the rebate will look like, though he said for students it will apply for the next eight weeks, while it will be twelve weeks for working holiday visa holders. Opposition Labor leader Anthony Albanese said Australia was "too reliant on overseas workers" in an opinion piece distributed by his office on Wednesday. Albanese said the Morrison government needed to address a skill shortage if the economy was going to recover fully from the pandemic.

"The long-term solution is to train more Australians to meet our own labor needs," he said. "It's extraordinary that we have a skills shortage at the same time as two million Australians are either unemployed or underemployed."

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