Australia introduces visa for innovation and startups

In March 2018, the Australian Government announced 2 pilot schemes targeted at supporting talent and innovation in Australia.

The two schemes are the Global Talent Scheme and Supporting Innovation in South Australia. Together, these aim to support business growth, skills transfer and job creation by attracting highly-skilled global talent to help foster innovative businesses in Australia.

These will support innovation in different ways:

• The Global Talent Scheme will provide:
  • businesses, including Australian startups, with a way to sponsor highly-skilled and specialised workers not covered by the standard Temporary Skill Shortage (TSS) visa (subclass 482) program
  • the cutting-edge skills Australia needs to compete globally.

• The Supporting Innovation in South Australia scheme will help support South Australia to attract foreign entrepreneurs to take forward innovative ideas and launch seed-stage startups.

The GTS is a niche pilot scheme under the TSS visa program. The 12 month pilot will run from 1 July 2018. The two streams under GTS are

• Established Business stream allows employers who are accredited sponsors to employ highly-skilled individuals with cutting-edge skills to contribute to innovation in an established business, and help make Australian businesses and their Australian employees the best at what they do.
• Startup stream allows employers to sponsor highly-skilled individuals with cutting-edge skills to contribute to Australia’s developing startup ecosystem and bring new ideas, new jobs, new skills and new technology for Australia. This stream is for startups operating in a technology based or STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) related field. Startups must be endorsed by the independent GTS startup advisory panel.

GTS as a pilot allows the Government to make refinements in consultation with industry to ensure it achieves its purpose.

The GTS is designed to benefit Australia and Australian workers. It is for bringing globally mobile, highly-skilled and experienced staff to Australia, who can act as ‘job multipliers’ in Australian businesses, helping them to hire more local staff and fill critical areas of need.

Any position filled through a GTS agreement must provide opportunities for Australians. These opportunities include the:

• creation of new jobs for Australians
• transfer of skills and knowledge to Australian workers.

The GTS is only for employers to fill highly-skilled positions that cannot be filled:

• by Australian workers
• through other visa programs, in particular the short-term and medium-term streams of the TSS visa.

You can read more about the scheme here