Driving in circles

I have sat on the board of numerous accreditation/assessment agencies for overseas qualifications/professions – the below is not an actual/specific person, but an amalgamation of the various people’s stories I have encountered in these roles.

At nighttime the city looks like a promise it has already half-kept.
The office towers are lit in scattered grids, a few windows still alive with late meetings, late ambition. The streetlights lay down their long yellow rectangles across wet asphalt. On the dash, a phone glows with a map that seems to update faster than the human mind can make meaning of it – left in 300 metres, right in 200, keep going, keep going.

He drives at night because the day is already spent.

In the daytime he is a student of Australian bureaucracy. He reads assessment criteria the way other people read sports pages. He clicks through portals, downloads PDFs, learns acronyms that feel like a second language layered on top of the first. He takes notes on what counts as “evidence” and what does not. He tries to turn the life he lived before, his degree, his job titles, his designs, his projects, his reputation, into the kinds of documents that an Australian system can recognise.

At night he drives because, in the meantime, he has rent.
And because the app rewards him for being available when other people are asleep.

We’ll call him Samir. Not his real name, but close enough to the sound of it. He is in his thirties, a migrant professional with an engineering degree and several years of experience in his home country. In another timeline, the kind of timeline that immigration brochures like to show, he would have arrived here and stepped into a role that used his skills, designing systems, solving problems, building infrastructure. He would have been exactly what we say we want – trained, motivated, ready to contribute.

Instead, he drives in circles.

The circles are literal, around the CBD, around the airport, around the late-night suburbs where people spill out of bars and into the back seats of strangers’ cars. They are also moral circles – around the same arguments we keep having as a country about skills, labour, migration, and “productivity,” as if we have forgotten that human beings are not just bodies to be counted but minds to be used. And they are bureaucratic circles, loops of assessment and re-assessment, fees and forms, required documents that expire before you can submit them, requirements that presume you have the very local experience you are trying to gain.

A Common Story

Samir’s story is common enough to be almost invisible – highly trained people doing low-paid work while they try to become legible to the Australian professional system. We call it “under-utilisation.” We call it “underemployment.” We call it a “transition.” We call it a lot of sanitising names.

Samir calls it “wasting time.”

On a Friday night, he picks up a passenger outside a restaurant. The passenger is cheerful in the slightly too loud way people are cheerful when they’ve had a few drinks and are trying to stay kind. He asks the usual questions – “How’s your night going?” “Busy?” “Where are you from?” It is a script as old as taxis and as new as apps.

Samir answers politely. He has learned which details invite curiosity and which invite pity. He says the name of his country. He says he’s been here two years. He keeps his voice neutral. The passenger asks if he likes Australia. He says yes. He always says yes.

Then comes the question that has become a small bruise in his week.

“So, what do you do?”

It’s a strange question to ask someone who is driving you somewhere. It’s like asking a nurse what they do while they’re literally holding your life steady. It reveals how deeply we treat certain kinds of work as invisible – driving is what you’re doing until you do what you do.

Samir could say, “I’m an Uber driver.” That’s true. But the whole truth is complicated. So, he says, as he often does, “I’m studying.”

The passenger nods, happy with a simple story. “Nice. What are you studying?”

Here Samir pauses for half a second longer than comfortable. It’s a tiny hesitation, but it carries a lot. He is deciding what version of himself to offer.

“Engineering,” he says.

The passenger’s tone changes, surprise, admiration, the little lift people do when they think they have found a “good migrant” story. “Engineering! Wow. So why are you driving?”

Samir smiles, though the passenger cannot see it in the dark. “In the meantime,” he says. “You know.”

He has learned that if he tries to explain the system, people either don’t believe him or they look uncomfortable, as if the explanation has turned a casual ride into an accusation. He doesn’t want an argument with someone in the back seat of his car at midnight. He wants the five-star rating. He wants the fare. He wants to get home.

But inside he is thinking – in the meantime is where years go to die.

In the late morning, after a few hours of sleep, Samir makes coffee and opens his laptop.

The day is filled with tasks that look, from the outside, like diligent self-improvement. He watches online modules. He drafts documents. He researches accreditation pathways. He writes and rewrites the same paragraphs until they sound less like the work he did elsewhere and more like the work Australia will recognise.

This is one of the central humiliations of skilled migration – you must translate your competence into someone else’s confidence.

That translation costs money. It costs time. It costs identity.

Samir lists the expenses the way people list the costs of a renovation – one thing on top of another until you realise you’ve paid more for the admin than for the actual material.

There are fees for assessments. Fees for certification. Fees for translating documents into English even when your English is already fluent, because the system prefers stamps to trust. Fees for police checks. Fees for visas, of course. Fees for courses that aren’t formally mandatory but feel mandatory if you want anyone to take you seriously. Fees for “bridging” programs. Fees for professional membership. Fees for getting your résumé rewritten in “Australian style.”

Some weeks, he tells me, the fees have been higher than what he earns from driving.

He says it without melodrama. He is not asking for sympathy. He is describing a strange economic reality – paying to prove you are employable while doing work that is meant to be temporary but becomes sticky.

Every system like this has a hidden tax. We should be honest about who pays it.

Australia is, rightly, proud of being a migrant nation. We celebrate the story in broad strokes – we bring people here, they build a life, the country benefits from their energy and skills. It is a good story when it works.

But like most national myths, it becomes unhelpful when it hides the complicated middle.

Skilled migrants often arrive with significant debt. They have already paid for education. They have already paid for the process of being selected. Many have left behind careers where they were respected. They arrive with the kind of optimistic discipline that systems love to exploit – they will work hard, they will accept temporary hardship, they will “do what it takes.”

And then they discover the reality of the transition. It is a matter of being allowed to begin in the first place.

The cruel joke is that Australia selects many skilled migrants because it wants their qualifications, and then treats those qualifications as suspicious once they arrive. We welcome the credential at the border and doubt it in the job interview. We say, “we need engineers” and then ask for “local experience” as if engineering principles change at Customs.

Samir’s story shows how this becomes a class divide inside the migrant story itself. Those with financial buffers can afford unpaid internships, extended periods of study, time spent networking, living off savings. Those without buffers must work immediately. Platform work becomes the easiest bridge because it is instantly available and requires no Australian referees.

But the bridge can become a trap.

The gig economy is marketed as freedom – “be your own boss,” “work when you want,” “earn on your schedule.” It is also, in practice, a private welfare system for people the formal labour market cannot or will not absorb quickly.

When your rent is due, the app wins. When your course fees are due, the app wins. When your family back home needs money, the app wins.

And because the work is algorithmically managed, it creates a new kind of pressure – you are not just working, you are being scored. Ratings, acceptance rates, on-time performance, metrics that decide whether the app will feed you enough work to survive.

Samir is always aware of his rating. Not in a neurotic way, more like a person with a fragile visa status is always aware of their visa. It is a background anxiety. A constant reminder that you are, in the system’s eyes, a service provider, not a professional in transition.

He tells me he feels his brain changing. “At night,” he says, “I become like… a machine. Just follow map, follow rules. Don’t think too much.”

In the day, he tries to think again. He tries to return to the kind of thinking engineering requires – long-term, structured, conceptual. But his mind is tired. It has been in reactive mode for hours.

Withering Skills

This is one of the less discussed costs of under-utilisation – the person’s relationship to their own skills begins to erode.

You can lose confidence not because you are incompetent, but because your competence is unused long enough to feel like a story you once told about yourself.

Ask any migrant professional what slows them down and you will hear the same phrase, repeated with a kind of weary disbelief – “Australian experience.”

It sounds reasonable on the surface. Employers want to know you can operate in local regulations, local standards, local communication styles. In some professions, safety and compliance are not trivial. The stakes can be high.

But “Australian experience” often becomes a lazy proxy for something else – familiarity, cultural comfort, risk aversion, and sometimes prejudice. It becomes a way to say no without saying why.

Samir applied for entry-level roles. Not senior roles, not managerial roles. He applied for roles that were, in his view, beneath his capability but relevant enough to be a foothold. He got few responses. When he did get interviews, he felt himself being evaluated not just on competence but on whether he sounded like someone they could imagine in the lunchroom.

He tried to adjust. He watched videos about Australian interview style. He rewrote his CV. He changed his cover letters. He joined LinkedIn groups. He did the networking that migrants learn to do as a form of survival – reaching out politely, asking for coffee meetings, building a web of soft connections that might one day turn into an opportunity.

He also did something that many migrant professionals do but rarely admit – he considered changing his name on his résumé, or at least shortening it, or anglicising it. Not because he wanted to erase himself, but because he wanted to pass the first gate.

This is what wasted potential looks like at the human level. Not just a mismatch of labour supply and demand, but a slow pressure to become less yourself in order to be employable.

Engineering, like many professions, has standards. Australia has specific regulations, codes, and safety requirements. Any serious country should care about who designs bridges, buildings, energy systems, transport networks. Competence matters.

The problem however, is how we implement these standards.

Samir spends hours trying to understand which pathway applies to him. He learns the difference between recognition and assessment. He learns what counts as “equivalent.” He learns that some documents must be certified and some must be translated, and some must be both. He learns that the assessor wants not just the fact of his experience but the narrative of it, the “demonstration” that he knows what he says he knows.

On paper, it is rational. In practice, it is exhausting, expensive, and carries the sense that you are always being asked to prove yourself from scratch, as if your past life is a rumour.

He tells me that back home, he was the person people came to when something was difficult. He was not a genius, he says, but he was reliable. He had a reputation. He had colleagues who trusted him. He had projects he could point to in the physical world – “I worked on that.” “I designed that.” “I solved that.”

Here, he is a file.

He is a set of scanned PDFs. A bank statement. A police check. A test result. A declaration. A profile. A number.

When we talk about migration policy, we tend to talk in numbers. Intake levels. Skills shortages. GDP impact. Those debates matter. But Samir’s story forces a different question – what does it do to a person to be reduced to paperwork?

There is a phrase economists use – “human capital.” It is a cold phrase for something intimate. It refers to the knowledge and skill embodied in people, everything education, experience, and practice build over years.

Human capital is one of the most valuable assets a country can have. It is also one of the easiest to waste, because wasting it does not look like a crisis. It looks like someone driving you home from dinner.

We should be clear about what is happening in stories like Samir’s. We are taking people who have already invested years in training and professional development, often partly funded by another country’s education system, and we are letting that capacity sit unused while they navigate a slow accreditation and hiring process.

Some will eventually make it through and contribute at a high level. Many do. Australia has countless success stories. The problem is the time lost. The years of underemployment. The early career momentum that stalls. The mental health effects. The skills that degrade.

There is a kind of grief in migration that is not about missing home, but losing status.

Not status in the vain sense, but status in the relational sense – being someone whose competence is recognised. Being someone who can help. Being someone whose work matters.

Samir does not want to be admired. He wants to be useful.

Instead, he spends his nights in a car, listening to strangers talk on speakerphone, arguing with their partners, singing badly, vomiting occasionally, asking him to “just stop here” in unsafe places. He watches people stumble out of bars and into apartments he cannot afford. He drives past construction sites where he can tell, from a glance, that certain things are wrong, and then he remembers he is not the person who gets to fix them.

He calls his parents back home and tells them he is “fine.” He tells them Australia is good. He tells them he is “in the process.” He does not tell them how often he feels small. He does not tell them how often he wonders if he has made a mistake.

This is another hidden cost – the emotional labour migrants do to protect their families from the truth of the struggle. Families back home are often proud. They have sacrificed. They have lent money. They have told relatives, “He is in Australia now.” Admitting difficulty can feel like betraying that pride.

So, Samir keeps driving.

Australia admires hustle. We like people who work hard. We celebrate resilience. We admire those who “start from nothing” and “make it.”

Those values can be admirable. They can also be used as an excuse.

Because if we treat stories like Samir’s as merely individual hustle stories, “he’ll get there eventually”, we avoid seeing the structural design. We turn systemic friction into personal character-building.

The question is not whether Samir is working hard enough. He is. The question is why the system requires this much unpaid, unrecognised labour of proof. And why the cost of that proof is disproportionately paid by those with the least power.

Recognising Foreign Credentials

Australia is not alone in struggling with credential recognition. Many countries do. The tension is real – we want standards, we also want fair pathways. We want safety, we also want efficiency. We want to avoid fraud; we also want to avoid waste.

But the way we currently manage this tension often errs toward distrust.

We build systems as if every overseas qualification is a potential problem unless proven otherwise. We require migrants to re-perform competence through localised hoops. We demand evidence that often cannot be produced easily because it depends on employer cooperation in another country, or because projects were done under different documentation cultures.

In doing so, we inadvertently create a kind of professional purgatory.

We also create perverse incentives. Some people end up re-studying in Australia, not because they lack knowledge, but because a local credential is the only currency employers reliably accept. This can be good for universities and colleges; it can be expensive for the individual and redundant for the country.

Others give up on their profession entirely. They become permanently underemployed. They become what the data calls “skilled migrants in low-skilled jobs.” They become, in lived terms, people whose confidence shrinks over time.

And the longer it goes on, the harder it becomes to re-enter the profession. Employers see the gap and ask, “Why haven’t you been working in engineering?” The honest answer, “because you wouldn’t let me”, is not an answer that helps.

There is something quietly brutal about platform work – it treats every worker as interchangeable.

It doesn’t care that Samir is an engineer. It cares that he is close to the passenger, that his car is clean enough, that his rating is high enough, that he accepts enough jobs quickly. The algorithm doesn’t discriminate in the personal sense. It is indifferent. And indifference, when you are trying to be seen, can feel like a kind of erasure.

The passenger doesn’t see Samir’s degree. They see a car arriving on a map.

Sometimes, late at night, Samir picks up young professionals who talk about their work, their projects, their clients, their stress. They complain about their bosses and their deadlines. Samir listens politely and offers neutral comments at red lights. Sometimes he feels resentment, but mostly he feels a strange dislocation – he is close to the world of professional work, but not inside it. He is the person enabling it, not the person recognised by it.

Then the passenger asks, casually, “So do you do this full time?”

Samir says, “For now.”

“For now” is the phrase that keeps people sane. It implies a future. It implies a pathway. It implies that this is temporary.

But “for now” can stretch.

The wasted potential isn’t only his.

If Samir were simply an individual story, one man struggling, one man’s bad luck, it would be sad but not politically urgent.

Every Samir represents not only a personal frustration but a national inefficiency. A lost contribution. A set of skills sitting idle. A set of taxes not paid at the level they could be. A set of innovations not made. A set of professional shortages not eased.

We spend years debating “skills shortages” as if they are purely about numbers – not enough engineers, not enough nurses, not enough teachers, not enough tradies. But sometimes the shortage is a blockage, a failure to convert available talent into effective participation.

Building Bridges

There are ways to build better bridges without lowering standards. In fact, better bridges can improve standards, because they create clearer, more consistent pathways rather than leaving people to improvise.

These bridges include:

1 – Faster, more transparent recognition processes. If a profession requires assessment, the pathway should be predictable. Clear timelines. Clear requirements. Clear fee structures. Fewer duplicative steps. The current system often feels like an obstacle course designed by people who have forgotten what it is like to be new.

2 – Subsidised assessments and bridging for low-income skilled migrants. If the country wants skilled workers, it should not require them to self-fund the entire conversion process while earning gig-economy wages. There is a strong economic case for targeted subsidies – helping people enter their field faster increases tax revenue and reduces underemployment. It is an investment, not a handout.

3 – Paid, structured “local experience” programs. The most perverse injustice is requiring “local experience” while providing no paid way to obtain it. Government and industry could co-design paid placements, real roles, with supervision, specifically for accredited or near-accredited migrants. Not unpaid “opportunities,” not charity internships, but proper paid professional bridging.

4 – Employer incentives that reward hiring and mentoring, not just “innovation.” We subsidise lots of things in Australia. We can subsidise the conversion of overseas talent into local contribution. Wage subsidies or tax incentives for employers who take on skilled migrants in their trained field, especially in shortage areas, would shift risk away from individual migrants and towards collective benefit.

5 – A cultural shift away from lazy proxies. “Local experience” should not be a blanket filter. It should be a specific requirement only when truly necessary. We should encourage employers and HR departments to interrogate what they actually need – local standards knowledge, yes, but that can be taught. Communication skills, yes, but accents are not incompetence. Safety knowledge, yes, but that can be assessed directly.

None of this is radical. It is the kind of practical, boring reform that makes a country function better.

And yet we often avoid it because the people most affected do not have strong political voice. They are busy driving at night.

Under Employment

Under-utilisation is sometimes framed as an economic issue – wasted skills, lost productivity.

It is that. But it is also an ethical issue, because it concerns what we owe people we invite into our community.

If we select people for their skills, we owe them a genuine chance to use those skills.

Not a theoretical chance. Not a “maybe you’ll get lucky.” Not a “work hard and see what happens.” A structured chance.

Otherwise, we are not running a skilled migration program so much as a hope extraction program – we import people’s optimism, accept their fees, benefit from their labour in low-paid sectors, and then congratulate ourselves on being welcoming.

That would be an uncomfortable thing to admit. Which is why we prefer not to look too closely at the person driving us home.

On another night, Samir picks up an older couple from the airport. They are tired, kind, and talk softly to each other. They ask him where he is from. They ask if he has family here. He says no, not yet. They tell him Australia is lucky to have him. They say it in the way older Australians sometimes say things, generous, sincere, wanting to be good.

Samir thanks them. He feels the warmth of it and the ache of it.

Because luck is not what is missing. Structure is.

He drops them at their hotel. They thank him again. He watches them go inside. He checks the app. There is another fare. Another pickup. Another set of directions. Another loop.

As he drives, he passes a construction site lit like a stage. Huge machines stand still. A crane points at the sky like a question. He thinks, briefly, about the work he did back home, calculations, designs, safety margins. He remembers the feeling of solving something hard. He remembers the respect of being the person who could be trusted with complexity.

Then the app tells him to turn left. He turns left.

Australia likes to talk about itself as a practical country. A country that gets things done. A country that builds.

If we want to live up to that self-image, we should treat wasted human potential as a national problem.

Because the quiet waste is in the kind of society we become when we normalise the sight of skilled people doing unskilled work for years, not as a stepping stone but as a holding pen.

It’s in the way we teach migrants that their past life is not real until Australia stamps it. It’s in the way we teach employers that “safe” hiring is more important than fair hiring. It’s in the way we let platform work quietly absorb the friction of our professional systems, turning structural failure into individual hustle.

A country that genuinely valued talent would not allow this to be common.
A country that genuinely valued productivity would not design systems that keep people in limbo. A country that genuinely valued dignity would not make people choose between paying for accreditation and paying rent.

Near dawn, Samir parks near a servo and buys coffee. The sky is beginning to pale. The city looks different in that light, less glamorous, more honest. He sits in the car for a moment and scrolls through messages on his phone.

There is one from a friend in his home country – a photo of a project they are working on, something Samir would have loved to solve. There is one from his mother – a voice message telling him to eat properly, to sleep, to take care. There is one from an accreditation forum – someone complaining about new requirements, someone else offering advice.

Samir takes a sip of coffee and opens his laptop again, right there in the parked car, because the day has started and the work of becoming employable begins again.

He looks, for a moment, like the most modern kind of worker – a person whose office is wherever the Wi-Fi reaches, whose boss is an algorithm at night and a bureaucracy in the day, whose life is an endless series of optimisations.

But if you look closer, you see something older and simpler.

You see a person trying to contribute. Trying to belong. Trying to become legible.

We should want that effort to succeed quickly, not only for his sake but for ours.

Because every time Samir drives in circles, the country is also driving in circles, repeating the same debates about shortages and productivity while letting skilled minds idle in the back seat of the economy.

We can do better than this. We can build a system where the talented people we invite here don’t have to spend years proving they deserve to begin.

Where “for now” doesn’t become a permanent holding pattern.

Where the driver who takes you home at midnight is not, quietly, an engineer whose potential we have decided to leave unused.

Where the circles finally break, into a straight line forward, for him, and for the country that claims to need what he already has.