Australia’s permanent migration program allows people from other countries to move to Australia as permanent residents, meaning they can live and work in Australia indefinitely.

One part of this program is skilled migration, which allows people with skills, qualifications, or work experience that Australia needs to migrate permanently.

For this debate, there are two approaches to skilled migration to compare:

1. Employer-sponsored migration: An Australian employer nominates a skilled migrant for a specific ongoing job that they need filled. The Australian Government then decides whether the migrant and the job meet relevant visa requirements. If the visa is granted, the migrant becomes a permanent resident.

2. Independent skilled migration: Migrants do not need a specific job or employer lined up. Instead, the Australian Government selects applicants based on criteria such as their skills, qualifications, work experience, and other factors relevant to Australia’s needs.

Throughout much of the 20th century, elite professional services industries (e.g. corporate law, investment banking, consulting, and Big Four accounting) placed significant emphasis on developing senior professionals internally and encouraging long-term careers within the same firm. In recent decades, these industries have seen increasing competition for established senior professionals between rival firms and greater movement of senior talent between employers. These contrasting approaches to building and retaining senior talent can broadly be understood as the internal-development model and the free-agent model.

Under the internal-development model, firms primarily recruit employees early in their careers, invest heavily in their training and development, and promote senior professionals from within. Careers are therefore more likely to be built within a single firm, with greater emphasis on institutional loyalty and long-term progression.

Under the free-agent model, firms compete more actively to recruit established senior professionals from rivals, often through individually negotiated compensation packages. Senior professionals are more likely to move between firms in pursuit of better compensation, opportunities, or resources, and may bring clients or colleagues with them.

For this debate, a major private development is a privately developed project large enough to have substantial effects on the local area. Examples may include major apartment developments, shopping centres, office or entertainment precincts, factories, data centres, and privately developed energy projects.

For the purposes of this debate, AI plays a “material role” in the production or delivery of a consumer service where its contribution meaningfully affects the substance of the service received by the consumer. Incidental uses of AI, such as basic spellchecking or administrative functions, are not considered material.

The Bubs is a hugely popular fictional universe spanning comics, television, films, and games. It is a sprawling universe featuring a large ensemble of heroes and villains, long-running conflicts, and heavily interconnected storylines. Its core characters and world have existed within one continuous canon for approximately 60 years. Events from decades-old stories remain part of characters’ histories and may continue to affect new stories.

The company that owns The Bubs, Bubby Studios, is considering adopting a periodic-reboot model. Under this model, every ten years the current continuity would permanently conclude and a new continuity would begin.

Each new continuity would retain The Bubs' core characters, powers, locations, and basic premise, but writers would be free to reinterpret characters’ personalities, relationships, histories, and major events without being bound by previous continuities.