The pond has a strict rule in relation to the reptiles and posting.
There's only so much anyone can take, and three posts in a day is simply too much, too perverted, even for swingers dropping their keys in a jumbled heap in The Ice Storm.
One post isn't sufficient, there's always a craving, a needy yearning for more, which is why the pond decided two should be the number. The pond once wrote it down, but will admit to a certain small amount of Pythonish borrowing:
There's only so much anyone can take, and three posts in a day is simply too much, too perverted, even for swingers dropping their keys in a jumbled heap in The Ice Storm.
One post isn't sufficient, there's always a craving, a needy yearning for more, which is why the pond decided two should be the number. The pond once wrote it down, but will admit to a certain small amount of Pythonish borrowing:
And the pond spake, saying, "First shalt thou take out the Holy Book of Reptiles. Then, shalt thou count to two. No more. No less. Two halt be the number thou shalt count, and the number of the postings shall be two. Three shalt thou not post, nor either post thou one, excepting that thou then proceed to two. Five is right out. Once the number two, being the second number, be reached, then, lobbest thou thy Holy Hand Grenade of Reptiliana towards thy foe, who, being naughty in My sight, shall snuff it."
But what happens if the pond goes for a walk around Camperdown and stumbles on one of the more elegant examples of Telstra infrastructure, a pit surely worthy of the NBN and its boldly marching of the nation into the twenty second century?
How could the pond resist showing off its find? Surely the rule of two isn't completely intractable? What did Harry once say?
And then the pond came across this, with the pleading solemn Watership Down eyes, and the gravitas and the gravity ...oh the nattering 'Ned' gravity ...
Where's the harm? Surely the pond had to break the law of two and make room?
Of course it's a long haul, perhaps best tucked away, ready for some reader pacing about with a screen in the wee hours after midnight.
Why just the first gobbet might exhaust them and send them off to noddy land, a silent blessing for nattering 'Ned' crossing their lips as they join the frolicking sheep ...
Now there are multiple ironies in this, what with Murdochians idly talking of populism and 457, though the pond can't exactly recall what they might be...
Nope, sorry the irony escapes the pond for the moment, and so we must proceed on to the next gobbet, wherein nattering 'Ned' tries to bore the socks off readers, and midnight owls gratefully embrace his words:
Indeed, indeed. Many a grateful sleeper has nodded off trying to resolve how embracing Pauline Hanson's xenophobia is at the same time not a reversion to racism, or that embracing nationalistic assertion and strident cultural traditionalism - of the white, angry Catholic Boys' Daily kind - isn't the cheapest sort of jingoism.
This is infinitely more difficult and demanding than trying to work out Schrödinger's cat, and as a bonus the sleepless get to admire a man prone to insufferable nonsense scribbling furiously about insufferable nonsense ...
What's even funnier is the way that this particular reptile now turns to the IT sector and academics - which is to say, dangerous, difficult elites - and listens to their plaintive howling, which surprisingly never troubled any of the reptiles back in the day when they believed that copper was the path to digital connectivity of a first world kind ...
Ah that pit, what a pit of progress and innovation ...
The pond is still trying to remember the ironies, and some how the way that 457 was conflated with rorting and with the unemployed and with teaching burger flippers advanced coding and Nobel-prizing winning science ... (please, no climate scientists welcome here, let them head off to the streets to march, or don sackcloth and ashes ... )
Perhaps the memory might be jogged with laugh-filled ethnic stereotypes. What a hoot ...
Okay, it's still buried somewhere in the noggin, but it'll come to the pond sometime, the pond is certain it will ...
Meanwhile, the pond had better tuck into some of that burgerlicious nattering 'Ned' for a final feast ...
Actually, it's pretty obvious that Malware pandered to the populist reptile balance this week ... and probably got it just about right. Even the onion muncher could see it. Why back in 2013 he was talking this way ...
"The Minister [Brendan O'Connor] claimed that there were some 10,000 examples of rorts and he wasn't able to produce any evidence at all," he said on Thursday. "Now we have a media report that there may have been up to 200 examples of maltreatment of people on 457 visas. Well, let the authorities look into this and let them deal with it."
Mr Abbott said people on 457 visas were making a "valuable contribution" and the government was trying to distract from its problems with border control. "This is simply dog-whistling from a bad government." (Abbott defends 457 visas).
... to this just a few days ago ...
Former Prime Miniser Tony Abbott has told Sky News the government has made the right move.
'I don't mind immigrants coming into this company who are going to make an economic contribution from day one. What we want is high skilled, high wage people not low skill low wage people,' he said.
'The problem is that Bill Shorten was the absolute champion at bringing people in, even to flip burgers and McDonalds, that was wrong and the government is now, to its credit, taking some action to stop it.'
(cached here)
Meanwhile, anyone with the remotest connection to the IT industry knew how important 457 was in maintaining innovation and growing the sector, and how important the free flow of academia was for the country ... and how important protecting this would be when coming to fine-tuning of skilled visa entry would be...
But innovation and skill and the wired country was yesterday's mantra, and now Malware is in the clutches of the mutton Dutton, a man of profound ignorance, not to mention bigotry and Manus Island lying ...
But innovation and skill and the wired country was yesterday's mantra, and now Malware is in the clutches of the mutton Dutton, a man of profound ignorance, not to mention bigotry and Manus Island lying ...
And it was the Murdochian reptiles, with their mocking of innovation, their love of copper, and their hatred of damned furriners that helped guide Malware there ... amazingly into the arms of trade unions ...
This has been going on for a long time ... and we have now reached a most unfortunate destination, and typically nattering 'Ned' spares not a thought, a jot or a dog's whistle on how the Murdochians helped get us there ...
Was it as far back as 2015 that First Dog did this cartoon about the onion muncher and the mutton Dutton, as he imagined the world of 2019 for the dinkum Oz citizen? The full cartoon is here ...
Was it as far back as 2015 that First Dog did this cartoon about the onion muncher and the mutton Dutton, as he imagined the world of 2019 for the dinkum Oz citizen? The full cartoon is here ...
Oh dear, it seems I got it all wrong, not David Crowe. In his long screed, Neddy says:
ReplyDelete"With numbers reduced from Labor's time in office, there are now about 95,000 such visa-holders [primary 457 visas] in this country, a tiny percentage of our total workforce."
Oh not again, I thought, not again. But I finally managed to find the Department of Immigration and Border Patrol's (DIBP) most recent official report [ https://www.border.gov.au/ReportsandPublications/Documents/statistics/457-quarterly-report-30-09-2016.pdf ]. It clearly states that as at 30 September 2016 there are 95,758 Primary 457 visa holders in Australia - so Neddy's (and Crowe's) number was right.
How to explain this ? After all, as many as 90,000 Primary 457 visas are granted every financial year (even more back in Bill's days). Well, as Neddy says, it comes down to this:
"At present about 50,000 of our annual skilled migration intake comes from onshore 457 visa-holders. The scheme has evolved to become a vital migration pathway."
So what has happened is that the Primary 457 visa is not so much an employment activity, but, as Neddy says, a major immigration pathway: most who get a Primary 457 get a 'permanent residency' visa very quickly - maybe in about a year or even less, so although the 457 visa has a 4 year 'life' very few last anywhere near that long before being switched into permanent residency, and hence terminating the 457.
Oh mea culpa for not basically understanding this significant transition. However, when both Crowe and Neddy aver that 457s are a very small percentage of the Australian workforce that only applies to currently active 457s. If we add up all of the Australian workforce that came in on 457s - though they quickly became 'permanents' - then the percentage is very significant.
So I guess the question basically is: do we want to have immigrants just arrive here and then have to find a job, or do we want them to have a job (via the 457) before they arrive here.