Everything we have been hearing from the IT recruitment industry since late 2004 suggests that an IT jobs boom is underway and that a skills shortage is looming. However, the reality doesn't quite match the rhetoric. To paraphrase from a great Shakespearian play, "There's something rotten in Denmark."

Last week, we did a story for the Fairfax IT supplement, Next, in which three of Australia's most senior IT recruiters claimed that an IT skills shortage is upon us. They said that there is now a shortage of IT people across all levels of the industry, from graduates up to senior project managers. One of the recruiters raised the possibility of lobbying the Federal Government to allow more temporary skilled migrants in. Well it didn't take long for the howls of derision to come pouring in from IT workers at the coalface. Self serving rubbish was the general consensus of opinion from both the employed and unemployed among the ranks of Australia's considerable pool of IT talent.

There may well be an IT jobs recovery underway but to date the IT recruitment industry has not been able to produce a shred of evidence that there is a shortage of skills in Australia. All recruiters we spoke to claimed that a shortage of IT graduates is either looming or is already upon us. Once again, not a shred of evidence exists to support this claim. However, there is evidence that suggests the opposite. An article that appeared in Beer Files last month shows that at least half of the major employers of graduates are not interested in IT graduates.

Now, all of a sudden, IT recruiters are screaming, "Jobs boom! Skills shortage! We must increase our IT temporary immigration program and we must do it now!" If we remember correctly, the IT recruitment industry, through its representative body ITCRA (IT Contract & Recruitment Association), was screaming exactly the same thing in the midst of the IT recession. The recruiters only stopped screaming about the fictitious skills shortage when even they couldn't keep a straight face while blowing their hot air.

However, we hear that the fix is in. ITCRA and 12 of its representative IT recruiters presented a submission on 31 January to Immigration Minister Senator Amanda Vanstone in which it has called for an increase in temporary skilled migration. It wants to boost IT temporary immigration and it wants to make it easier for temporary immigrants to stay on past their designated visas if they have further work that needs doing. This of course will greatly benefit recruiters, who will have lots of lovely bonded foreign workers on their books that they can supply to their clients at fat margins, as well as contract management companies, who can skim margins off the foreign workers' salaries for handling their financial affairs. The people it won't benefit of course are Australian IT professionals, who will have to compete with an unnecessary influx of temporary foreign workers being shoved to the front of the jobs queue by IT recruiters.

We sincerely hope that the Minister is too smart to be taken in by this not so clever ploy to fatten the pockets of the recruitment elite at the expense of talented Australian IT professionals.