In the Federal Budget from May 2024, the government announced that the work experience requirement for the Temporary Skill Shortage (TSS) visa program was due to be reduced from two years to one year. This change was proposed to take effect from 23 November 2024.
Fast forward to earlier this month – plenty of speculation and comments about changes to the program due to take effect “before the end of the year”, but no legislation.
The 23rd of November came and went, with no amending regulations. As such, as at today’s date, the work experience requirement set out in cl 482.221, cl 482.231 and cl 482.242 remains that a visa applicant must have worked in the nominated occupation or a related field for at least two years.
We are still waiting for the Skills in Demand (‘SID’) visa, which we are also told will be introduced before the end of the year. Potentially, the changes to the work experience requirement could be introduced in the legislation for the SID visa. The Migration Amendment (Strengthening Sponsorship and Nomination Processes) Bill 2024 is currently before parliament, but apart from this bill, we have yet to see any other legislation. Parliament is due to break for summer, so whether or not the Senate has enough time to consider this bill remains to be seen. There have also not been any alerts for ImmiAccount maintenance, which would typically be expected with a change this significant.
It is impossible to accurately pinpoint when changes will take place, and in the absence of confirmation from the Department of Home Affairs, any dates being put forward are purely speculative. A lot of visa applicants and employers were hoping to rely on the reduction in the work experience in order to open up the TSS visa pathway, but unless or until the legislation changes, the work experience requirement for all streams of the TSS visa remains two years. Similarly, the Skills in Demand visa remains, at this stage, part of the Migration Strategy. Ultimately, without legislation, no proposed changes can take effect, regardless of what has been said in a media release, at a conference, in a strategy paper or in budget papers. We continue to advise clients on the basis of the legislation as it exists, and have been working to find alternative visa pathways for them as we wait to see what the last few weeks of 2024 brings.
