This is a long read. I am not an easy person to like until you get to know me - hopefully me trying to explain my mindset and what shaped it helps you see why.
How Did All This Get Started
I served my apprenticeship in the eighties, in oil and gas, as a first-class welder and pipefitter. I was an adult apprentice with some hard life experience already behind me, and I treated the trade as the thing that would get me a better life if I put the work in.
Oil and gas ran on deadlines. There were no excuses. Projects finished on time and gas flowed on or before the due date. I wanted it right first time, every time, which made me hard to work with, and got things done.
I didn’t stop at the tools. I qualified as a Welding Supervisor under AS 1796 (Certificate No. 10, the top of that ladder) and later as a CSWIP Welding Inspector through TWI in Cambridge. So before I ever sat across an interview table, my job was judging other people’s work against a published standard. I’ve been assessing tradespeople one way or another my whole working life. The tools changed. The job didn’t.
Sam
I was lucky to have a guiding light: a mountain of a foreman called Sam. For whatever reason he took me under his wing. Wherever his next project went, he had me transferred with him: pipelines and rigs across Europe, module yards building rigs and barge cranes. We worked 28 twelve-hour days, then three days at home, with travel in our own time.
Sam taught me what hard work meant. He also taught me something he never intended to. He retired after 46 years with the same company, having run some of the largest piping contracts in Europe. Six months later he was gone. The lesson was that there has to be more to life than this.
Sam, rest in peace. You helped me in more ways than you knew, and I am doing my best to pay it forward.
Brisbane, January 1992
I remember three things about stepping off the plane.
I had left a European winter and I did not know what hot was until that day.
I did not know a single person in the country.
And I made myself a promise that I was going to make it work here.
One Visa Refusal - My Own
I tell people, truthfully that Skilled Migration Group has not had a visa application refused.
That is 100% true as at 29th July 2026, if we ever do get a visa application denied, this fact will be updated and we will explain the reasons. I’m not going to update the date every day, but I will update the record if it ever falls….
With that in mind, nobody can guarantee a visa outcome, and anyone who tells you they can should not be trusted with your file. Just because Skilled Migration Group have never had a visa denied before, doesn’t mean anything - past outcomes have zero bearing on new applications.
Before, way before Frances and I started our own companies, I did lodge a visa that was denied.
It remains the only visa application that I have been involved in that has been denied, AND IT WAS MY OWN VISA APPLICATION that was denied
It was my partner visa in 1992. Frances was a New Zealand citizen (she became an Australian citizen soon after that) and she was entitled to sponsor me. The bridging visa rules were different in those days and I had no work rights, so Frances kept us both for the fifteen months it took to get a decision.
The decision was a refusal. It was devastating, we were both shell shocked, not only was I not permitted to work, but now I was given 28 days to leave Australia.
We had no money for a lawyer or migration agent. We had no family to turn to, we could have just given up and departed Australia. But we didn’t, Frances wanted to fight it, I wanted to fight it, together we looked at our options..
In Australia the library was free, and I had 27 more days left, so I sat in that library read every possible book that helped, and I read the law.
I taught myself enough of an understanding of the migration law to work out what had happened and what could still be done, and I found that I could request the Minister to intervene.
I drafted the application for leave myself. It was granted.
Then I drafted the appeal requesting ministerial intervention and I lodged that too.
Nick Bolkus the Minister for Immigration and Ethnic Affairs back then, overturned the refusal and my visa was granted. Sadly Nick passed away in 2025, and the Prime Minister described him as a strong advocate for the benefits and contribution of multicultural Australia, and an example of how the nation was enriched by people of every background - which is, precisely, what he did for us, the amazing life that Frances and I have had together is in part down to the decision that he made. Visa decisions change lives…
It is the only visa application I have ever had refused, and it was my own.
I know exactly what that denial letter feels like when it arrives.
I have never forgotten it.
The Kitchen Table
In late 1999 I was working in the bush on a 48-degree day, frustrated that we could not get the right people and that projects were slipping because of it I had strong words with my boss. He said: “If you’re so smart, buy a recruitment company and run it your way.” That night I called home at sat-phone prices and asked Frances whether she wanted to do exactly that. She said let’s go for it. I gave 30 days’ notice the next morning. The company’s first day of trading was the first of April, 2000. April Fools’ Day. We noticed. We opened anyway.
There is a longer version of that story, and Frances tells her half of it on her own page. The short version is that there have been two names on this company from the first day. I find the people. She gets them here. One of us checks the other one’s work, and you can probably guess which way round.
The Union Years
Before the recruitment story properly starts, one more document. In 2001 the CEPU Plumbing Division thanked me for serving on the union’s Queensland Committee of Management - and for doing the Journal and the Web site.
The ethos and the ethics - always treat people equally, stand up for what’s right, and stand up for people less fortunate than us - were learned there.
Developing International Recruitment Programs
In 2004 I started recruiting overseas because of the skills shortages in Australia: highly skilled workers from the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore.
In 2008 HDAL asked for 16 technicians. They interviewed 25 of our candidates and hired 22, raising the order on the spot. That became a bespoke international recruitment program that has run ever since, extended to other Cat dealers in 2010 and other OEM’s in 2012, and has deployed vast numbers of Caterpillar and Komatsu trained workers into Australia, PNG and New Caledonia.
In 2012 I developed and wrote our quality management system myself. SAI Global audited it against ISO 9001 and it passed first time.
The Other Half Of The Job
Finding a person a job is half of it. I worked that out early.
The other half is the visa. That is where a worker is exposed. It ties them to an employer. It can be held over them. And it is the thing that people with fewer scruples than us use to take money off people who have not got it to spare.
For years I relied on other people to know that half.
Good people. But not me.
And I have never liked not knowing. I had taught myself a piece of it once already, in a library, in 1992. So I went and learned it.
I sat the exams and became an Australian Registered Migration Agent. Then I did it again for New Zealand and became a Licensed Immigration Adviser. This November I finish a Master’s in Australian Migration Law and Practice.
I will be honest with you: it was harder than the welding.
Welding I could see. Get the fit-up right, run the root, cap it, and either the X-ray passes or it does not.
Law is not like that. I sat at the kitchen table at night with a stack of reading and a head full of nothing, wondering who I thought I was. A pipefitter doing a Master’s. Frances will tell you I was not much company for a while.
But I know why I did it. When I sit across from a fitter in Lusaka and tell them what a visa grant would permit them to do, what their rights are, and what nobody is allowed to charge them, I am not repeating something the office told me. I know it. And if I am wrong, it is on me.
I Don’t Interview People. I Listen, We Talk and Share Experiences
My approach is hands on because I have been in the boots. I migrated in my early twenties knowing nobody. As a tradesman I have worked in 53 degrees and in minus 30. I worked FIFO long before anyone used the phrase family friendly: six and eight weeks on, one week off, travel in your own time.
That taught me empathy. Visiting a remote site for a day is one thing. People change when they work away from home, and nobody is in the same head space on day 24 of a swing as they were on day one.
And the inspection ticket taught me the other half: how to assess a tradesman’s work honestly, against a standard, without fear or favour. Candidates tend to say our conversations feel like two people who respect each other talking, rather than an interview. Both things are true at once. It is a friendly conversation, and I am watching everything.
Three Attempts at Retirement
We bought a small farm in France and I tried to retire. It did not take. I have tried three times now. Frances knew before I did that it would not work, and I never sold a share of the business at any point.
What I did instead was go back to school. I was forty-nine.
First a TEFL certificate in Toulouse, four weeks intensive, which qualified me to teach English as a foreign language. Frances sat the same course. Then a French forestry diploma, felling and timber work. Then heavy plant: hydraulic excavators and loaders, a French national vocational qualification, and an operator’s ticket that runs to 2031.
The trade courses were taught in French. So were the exams.
I mention it for one reason. Every person I sit across from in Lusaka, Lima, or Manila is being interviewed in English, which is not their first language, and will go to work in it. I have been trained to teach English to people learning it, and I have sat trade exams in a language that was not my own. I know both sides of that.
It gets used. We prepare candidates for their English language tests at no charge, and Frances and I write and run the cultural awareness seminars for the workers deploying to Australia and New Zealand.
None of that is new. In 2002 our first company was giving away site safety inductions and confined space training. By 2008 we were running pre-departure seminars for workers heading to Australia. If you can make workers safer or more employable, you do it.
The short version of me - registrations, career, receipts - is back on the profile. Quality never goes out of style.