[Peetwo]

Update: 04/01/2018

Almost missed this one..

Via the DT..

Foreign pilots decision puts our safety at risk


Nick Dyrenfurth
January 4, 2018 12:00am




THE Turnbull government think they can play the Australian people like a piano.

In April, Prime Minister announced a so-called ‘ban’ on 457 foreign worker visas. It would ‘ensure Australian workers are given the absolute first priority for jobs.’ Yet an almost identical Temporary Work Visas became law at the same time.

Turnbull went on: ‘We are making it easier for Australians to find work and we have restored order to our borders so we can ensure foreign workers have an opportunity to arrive through the appropriate channels.’

Note the stress on ‘restoring order to our borders’ and ‘absolute first priority for jobs’. Because just this week comes news that foreign pilots will be allowed into Australia on two-year visas to address what Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton’s suggests is a growing shortage of local pilots. ‘Airline pilot’ will be found on a revised list of skilled occupations allowed into Australia under the list of new TWVs to be announced next month.

The shortage has, according to industry lobbyists and the government, already led to flight cancellations, not that any concrete evidence has been provided.

We should make it easier for student pilots like Claire Gipps, Nick Evans, Bec Spencer and Noah Mirosch to get their licences rather than importing foreign pilots. (Pic: Mark Calleja)

Even if the problem exists this solution is a sugar-hit which masks a larger issue. Why in the first place are we not properly investing in the domestic training of domestic pilots to fill labour market gaps?

Unemployment is at 7 per cent, not to mention massive underemployment, particularly in regional areas.

And why are we allowing our best and most experienced pilots to be poached by overseas carriers, notably Chinese companies?

The same goes for ownership of our airports.

It is a national disgrace that we are not training enough or retaining skilled pilots for our airlines when they should be expanding into a booming Asian market. We need government, business and unions to come together to fix this mess. Our safety depends upon it.

There is a real question mark over the qualifications and expertise of the foreign pilots flown in under the new visa system. Just ask the pilots who fly our iconic Qantas airline who have already voiced serious concerns. Every time we step on a plane we are told that our safety is their number one priority. Just who are we importing to fly millions of Australians across the expanses of our wide brown land?

In particular, regional flyers have reason for concern. This at a time when aviation safety has repeatedly been called into question as the Turnbull government under-resources both AirServices and Civil Aviation Safety Authority.

Australian and International Pilots Association president, Captain Murray Butt, has spoken of his concerns about the foreign pilot visas. (Pic: Justin Lloyd)

There are legitimate fears about what these foreign pilots will be paid too, at a time when wages growth is at its lowest ever recorded levels. Can the government provide a rock-solid guarantee that these pilots will not be used to undermine hard-earned wages and conditions of our local workers?

That doesn’t just go for pilots. It owes the same iron-clad guarantee to our hardworking airline hosties, baggage handlers and aircraft maintenance workers. Otherwise the idea of having foreign pilots is simply a smokescreen for the Liberals’ ideological obsession with creating a low-wage, insecure work, race-to-the-bottom economy.

Peter Dutton has made much of his role in the Abbott government’s success in stopping unauthorised boat arrivals to Australia through a tough policy combination of offshore detention and turnbacks. He is meant to be the nation’s tough cop-on-the-beat, protecting us against very real terrorist threats. Yet now appears Dutton’s plan for offshore retention.

Malcolm Turnbull’s main protector doesn’t want to protect the Australian public when they are flying, as so many of us are over the Christmas and New Year period.

Offshore retention entails people not trained to our highest safety standards and on lower wages being brought into the country and in charge of the precious human cargo navigating our skies.

Nick Dyrenfurth is Executive Director of the John Curtin Research Centre

MTF...P2