As a small bespoke software development company in Australia we have always hired employees first and foremost. Those employees have all been Australian citizens, there has been no need to use 457 visa’s to bring overseas people in. For us there is enough talent pool available here in Australia for us to source our new employees from.

But we also run offices overseas in the UK and the USA (this meant incorporating companies in the UK and the USA). In both those case we used the overseas equivalent of the 457 visa’s to enable us to send several highly skilled long term Australian employees over to those countries to help start up our overseas operations. This was essential because there were simply no people overseas that knew about our products, no one who was a technical expert, no one who knew how to install or support our products. Being able to utilise those 457 like visa’s overseas to facilitate our expansion into overseas markets has been essential to our success.

Yes, there is no place in Australia for a 457 visa program that is being rorted simply to employ lower cost workers from overseas.

However there is still a place in Australia for visa programs that allow global businesses to expand into the Australian market by bringing their highly skilled and highly paid workers across to Australia. Those initial foot soldiers are responsible for establishing the beach head from which a much larger company grows, a company that would employ many Australian workers as it grows. Those workers would pay tax here.

Both sides of politics are now realising that we can’t keep sending all the jobs offshore, or just bringing in overseas workers. Where are our kids and their kids going to work in Australia if there are no real jobs here?

As employers, parents and part of a larger community we must all do our part to help foster a strong economy here in Australia. A strong economy that provides a large choice of jobs to a wide variety of people, an economy where employers value their employees and employees value their employer.

A strong economy needs to be founded on an economy that makes things. We need research, design , development, manufacture, sales to happen here in Australia, not overseas.

Neither party, Labour or Liberal knows how to fix this. Billions of $ are wasted on programs (R&D Tax Concessions, Work for the Dole) that don’t seem to work. I don’t have the answer but I can see we have a big problem.

Running a business is hard work. Everyone wants a piece of you. You pay your suppliers, employees, super payments, payroll tax, company tax, office rental, insurances, electricity bills, bank fees etc and if you do a really good job you make a modest profit for all that risk that you took on. If you screw it up you can lose big time and so do your employees if you have to let people go.

The recent tax cuts for business are a good thing. They will provide us with some funds that we can re-invest into our ongoing product R&D to help us sell more product here in Australia and Overseas.

Mike Kirkby