Jobs jobs jobs

Richard Davoren writes: Re. “Time for another look at 457s” (November 16).  John Richardson is spot on. I have also written in Crikey on the impact of sending jobs off shore. A quick search on Google will find dozens of entrepreneurs spouting their skills in having replaced hundreds of  thousands of Australian jobs to mainly to the Philippines and India. They claim they can provide workers of every skill base. In reality,  most of the work is “back office” type, work that a young unemployed Australian would wish to have, at the start of their career.
The government gets no tax from these outsourced workers but pays increased amount for benefits for the unemployed, or pays no support at all and leaves the youthful unemployed to fend as best they can. From experience, I can assure you that the major political parties have no interest in this, “elephant in the room”.

On piracy

Chief Executive Officer Internet Australia Laurie Patton writes: Re. “Netflix, not legislation, is killing piracy” (yesterday). Internet Australia, the not-for-profit peak body representing Internet users, has long objected to Internet site-blocking. Overseas experience shows that it has a limited effect and is not a long term solution to unlawful content downloading. Our view, which was the Prime Minister’s stated position when he was Communications Minister, is that the best way to deal with unlawful downloading is for rights holders to make their content accessible at reasonable prices. The latest government report supports this proposition. What’s more, the overseas rights holders have never actually established that they are really losing significant amounts of revenue here in Australia. We are not even on the US list of serious offenders.