Australian Immigration Policies

Running Head: IMMIGRATION POLICY IN AUSTRALIA 1
Immigration Policy in Australia
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AUSTRALIAN IMMIGRATION POLICIES 2
Table of Contents
1.0 Introduction................................................................................................................................4
2.0 Australia’s Reliance on International Health Workers..............................................................5
3.0 Current Australian Policies on International Health Worker Immigration...............................6
4.0 Historical Reasons for Development of Immigration Policies in Australia..............................7
5.0 Current policies sustainability...................................................................................................8
6.0 Recommendations......................................................................................................................9
7.0 References................................................................................................................................10

AUSTRALIAN IMMIGRATION POLICIES 3
Executive summary
This paper scrutinizes Australia’s reliance on international healthcare workers in relation to its
current immigration policies. Australia has enacted immigration policies which are expected to
negatively affect its healthcare sector. This is in consideration to the fact that the country heavily
relies on international health workers to sustain its healthcare system. It relies on the data
recorded between 2006- 2011. The impacts of the country’s current immigration policies on
healthcare workers will be scrutinized with an aim of revealing how sustainable they are. Also,
the historical reasons which have led to the enactment of strict immigration policies in this
country like the high population will be scrutinized. Lastly, recommendations will be presented
with an aim of getting a solution for the problem which has been created by the enacted
immigration policies.

AUSTRALIAN IMMIGRATION POLICIES 4
1.0 Introduction
The world’s migration of healthcare workers has remained to be an issue of concern in
healthcare provision and development. Australia is among the major importers of health care
workers, but determining how outsourcing of health workers from other countries into the
Australian healthcare system has been a challenging endeavor, especially in regard to causation
relationships. Initially, migration of health care workers to Australia was governed by different
visa policies, which were administered by the department of immigration and citizenship. Most
of the overseas health care professionals would, therefore, enter the country freely through
temporary skilled visas for limited periods of time, up to 4 years. During the initial period, the
workers were allowed to seek additional assessment through the application of permanent
migration rights to Australia following positive assessments by relevant professional bodies and
registration boards (3.2.2 overseas trained health professionals). Overseas health workers would
be recruited directly by the employers, often through health professional recruitment agencies or
by territory and state governments directly. The current concerns about healthcare workers
movement from third world countries to first world countries have led to the implementation of
protocols such as “Commonwealth Code of Practice for the International Recruitment of Health
Workers”, where Australia is a member.
Australia is among the countries which have extraordinary reliance on international
medical practitioners compared to other OECD countries. From the year 2005 to 2011, 17910
healthcare practitioners were sponsored on a temporary basis to Australia, with an additional
2790 being selected as skilled migrants. Apart from this number, thousands of unfiltered
healthcare practitioners had also arrived in advance through different humanitarian agencies
(Accessing government health & welfare data). Australia’s reliance on international healthcare