My visa came through yesterday too. I'm glad I applied when I did because it seems to have been getting progressively more difficult over the six months.
Congratulations, Graemsay!
Re the "easier for hairdressers than academics"... that's definitely true. Here's a well-known racket in the Vietnamese community a few years ago (and probably Chinese etc, but I know Vietnamese who've done this)...
You have no special skills yourself, but you're an Australian permanent resident. You set up a hair or nail salon - out of your garage is fine, because it doesn't really matter if you have customers.
Now you need to employ nail technicians and hairdressers, both of which are on the old "skills in demand" list, and allow you to sponsor people to immigrate. So you advertise among your contacts in Vietnam that you can get people into Australia and will give them a good-paying job when they get here.
Your prospective staff pay you $50K and in return, they get a job for two years and immigration. The prospective staff go to a hairdresser or nail technician college in Vietnam that you nominate - they may have to spend a day or two there "learning", depending on just how flexible the college's "ethics" are - and after they've paid the college, say, $1,000, they give the prospective staff member a recognised "qualification".
You then sponsor the person to come to Australia and they're accepted. Then they have to work for you for 2 years, and I think there was a minimum wage you had to pay ($50K pa?) to qualify for sponsorship. So you pay them $50K pa on the books, and off the books, you deduct the $35K pa or whatever was left after tax etc as a "sponsorship fee". Since the $50K salary is a tax deduction to the business and you're getting $35K back, they effectively cost you nothing. Of course you get as many clients through your garage as you can.
So after 2 years, your staff member has citizenship and can go somewhere where they're hopefully not exploited - or at least, not as much.
You've got $50K up-front, and a staff member working for free for 2 years, who's probably earned you easily $40K per year (even at the cheap rates the Vietnamese charge!).
What I don't understand is that most Australians would be far more outraged at this than the Vietnamese - even those who know they're being exploited! They just accept it as "how the world works".
On a similar vein, many Vietnamese seem to think nothing of allowing other Vietnamese to employ them for very low wages. For example, I know someone who worked at a butcher's shop for $80 per day, and he worked "whatever was required", which turned out to be 13 hours. That's $6.15 per hour.
And of course it's all cash - no tax from wages, no payroll tax, no super, etc.
What frustrates me is this: these people (and I mean this particular group engaging in this behaviour,
not all Vietnamese) wanted to come to Australia because I assume they think we have a better quality of life.
Don't they understand that we have a better quality of life largely because we have protection for workers and pay decent taxes? If they're unwilling to participate in those activities, don't they see that they're eroding the very quality of life that attracted them to this country?
(For those who are unaware, I share my home with a Vietnamese family and have done so for 6 years. I have a Vietnamese goddaughter. I definitely have nothing against the Vietnamese; I just get frustrated at some of the practises that are tolerated within their community.)
