Understanding the impact of the spread of the coronavirus on the labour market will be critical to understanding the evolution of the Australian economy over coming months.

The LMT system is structured to ensure that employers are making genuine attempts to source local labour before resorting to seeking workers on temporary skilled visas. Concerns which are regularly raised include that employers are undertaking labour market testing disingenuously, which includes offering unreasonably poor wages and conditions in local advertisements in order to access cheaper labour through temporary skilled migrants.

For example, employers might inflate their employment standards for local applicants to an artificially high level so they can assert they have attempted but failed to find local labour, and there is no independent process to assess whether such rejections were based on genuine concerns.

More and more now it is claimed that it is not enough to say that there are constant adverts for workers in local agencies or media. Employers should be able to demonstrate to an audit process that the reasons for rejecting applicants were based on genuine concerns.

An independent market research report undertaken by a third party discussing the relevant industry market and an auditable, recruitment efforts together with empirical evidence is expected to present as strong evidence of a robust LMT system.