Australia’s Prime Minister Julia Gillard has called for Australian companies to plug the nation’s skills gap with local workers, rather than relying on skilled migrants, reports Australia’s ABC News.

Gillard’s comments directly contradict work done this week to attract Irish and Northern Irish workers to the country.

On Tuesday Alex Ward, president of Australia’s Law Council, the largest association of lawyers in Australia, appealed for Northern Irish solicitors to cover the shortfall in the country’s legal sector, according to the Belfast Telegraph.

Ward spoke as a guest of the Northern Irish solicitors association the Law Society, whose president Brian Speers welcomed the appeal in view of a lack of local opportunities during the downturn.

As reported by Recruiter on Monday, a recruitment fair south of the border in Dublin on Sunday was attended by the employment minister of Australia’s Northern Territory, giving the “hardest sell” of all exhibitors, according to the Irish Times.

Northern Territory will need in excess of 20,000 new foreign workers to fill positions in more than 130 different professions over the next five years, while the country as a whole accepted 115,000 skilled migrants in 2009, according to ABC.