The Immigration Department of Australia after having a sincere meeting with Ministerial Council has come up with the conclusion to reinforce its skilled migration program.

The Council holds the view that the skilled migration program is the need of Australia, and is the key to bridge the gap of skill specific labour shortage of Australia. In fact, in order to come up with the solution to flourish the economy of Australia, permanent and temporary migration program should also be expanded.

Senator Chris Evans encouraged the states and territories to take the full benefit of the state-sponsored skilled migration. As per the Federal Government’s permanent skilled migration program, states and territories have the option of sponsoring certain capacity of skilled workers from abroad. Therefore, Evans is in favour of sponsoring maximum numbers of workers from the side of state as per the need of the economy of Australia, and he is hopeful that this would help in overcoming the problem of labour shortage.

The Government increased the number of visas of skilled migration by 31,000 in May. This made the number of visas to reach 133,500 in the immigration program, 2008-09. As per the record of last financial year, around 7,500 visas of skilled migration were sponsored by state. The proportion of independent applications was more than half the number of applications of skilled migration, and the migration that were sponsored by employers was about 20%. All these together came up to 190,300 number of Australia’s migration visas. This increase in number of state sponsored visas is taken as a positive sign by Evans, which would fulfill the required skill of the state and territory of Australia.