Furthermore, it is well known that many thousands of students from India come to Australia every year to undertake cookery courses which lead to permanent or at least temporary residence.  All of these students need a minimum 900 hours of work as cooks, and it is my experience that for this purpose they are extremely eager to obtain employment as cooks in Indian restaurants for minimal wages or even no wages at all.  After applying for temporary residence they will usually have Bridging A visas permitting them to work full-time.  Those who subsequently obtain temporary residence as Skilled Graduates – which is virtually all of them – then need twelve months of employment in order to obtain permanent residence.  Holders of Skilled Regional Sponsored visas will also require employment before permanent residence is obtained.  Here, then, is a very large pool of qualified Indian cooks upon which employers may draw, and no special visa or employer approval process is required.

Then again, once an Indian citizen obtains permanent residence in this manner, then although he or she will no longer need employment for immigration purposes, nevertheless as a matter of practical reality he or she will need employment simply in order to make a living.  Here again, I should have thought, a large number of qualified Indian cooks would be seeking employment in this field.

I remind employers that the Australian Government expects that they should seek to fill positions from the local market before trying to recruit employees from offshore.  For the reasons above, I find it hard to see why this cannot be done.  However, if for some reason a restaurant proprietor finds it necessary to recruit cooks from India, then, as I understand it, the principal problem in obtaining a subclass 457 temporary work visa for the would-be employees will generally be the English language requirement, which was recently increased from an average of 4.5 on the IELTS Test to an average of 5.  This is not, one might think, such a very great increase.  In any event, the government has made room for exceptions.  One exception is where the employee has completed at least five years of continuous full-time secondary and/or tertiary education at an institution where at least 80% of instruction was conducted in English.  Another exception is where the employer is prepared to pay the employee a gross annual salary of $77,850.

If all else still fails, I suggest that the employer consider an arrangement pursuant to the Employer Nomination Scheme (or, if appropriate, the Regional Sponsored Migration Scheme) instead, so that the employee is granted a permanent visa.  Although the ENS requires vocational English and the RSMS requires functional English, these requirements can be waived if the employer can show exceptional circumstances.  As a matter of policy, it is normally accepted that exceptional circumstances apply if the employee does not need to use English in the course of his or her employment.  This would be the case if an Indian cook were working with other employees who could speak his or her own language.

As a number of commentators have pointed out lately, employers have for several years been given a great deal of leeway in selecting potential skilled migrants.  This is causing some problems in the Australian labour market, and it is difficult to see any further softening in government policy to accommodate employers.  In my view, there is ample room for most owners of Indian restaurants to find staff while complying with existing law and policy.