Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Immigration) Share this | Hansard source

I want to quote a member of this House who, on 2 February 1992, said in reference to an automobile company that employed 300 people:

They were looking for a tradesperson to do a particular job. They searched Australia and could not find one. They had to convince a tradesperson to migrate from England to fill that position. It is a sad indictment on this government that, after having been in power for 10 years, we have not got those trained tradespeople.

Admittedly, in 1992 when the now Deputy Prime Minister made those comments the government had not been in place for 10 years but rather for nine. But those were the words of the man who is now Deputy Prime Minister. He was complaining, ‘How bad is it that we have to import one tradesperson?’ At the time, no doubt members of the House of Representatives thought the objection was that Australia should be training Australians, but now we realise the problem that government had was that it was importing only one worker. The problem that this government has is that, instead of training Australians, you should import tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of tradespeople because it saves you from having to pay the cost of training Australians first and training Australians now.

The trade skills training visa has two impacts: the first is that it takes opportunities away from young Australians and the second, in the context of the new industrial relations laws, is that it drives down wages. We had the most extraordinary defence in parliament when the disallowance motion was moved by the new Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Immigration and Multicultural Affairs, who is in the chamber at the moment. It is extraordinary because first of all he thought, ‘Let’s just have a go and try to claim this is all about Labor and the unions’—the most bizarre argument when we are actually talking about providing training opportunities for young people who do not have a job. There are not that many people who do not have a job at all and are members of trade unions, but that was lost on the member for Goldstein.

He then went on—and this is the first time any member of the government has done this—to try to justify not advertising the positions locally. Every other member of the government has baulked at this; every other member of the government has tried to fudge it through by pretending that you have to advertise. But, if anyone missed it, on 27 February when we had this debate the member for Goldstein said this:

If they need to advertise to satisfy themselves no Australian is available, they will.

I will tell you Labor’s attitude and it is pretty clear: if you have a job vacancy you advertise it to the Australian people. You do not just go offshore because you know there is no negotiating power once you get rid of the no disadvantage test on AWAs. The government know there is no award system underpinning those wages, so they can go overseas and get somebody who will be so much cheaper for a business. No, we say your starting point is to advertise locally. If you cannot fill the position locally, you then do not say, ‘Okay, that’s it, let’s go straight overseas’; you should actually try to connect Australians to jobs. That is why I said, and I will say it again, that if you have a position available in Ballarat you advertise it first in Ballarat but you also ought to advertise it in Bendigo, Blacktown, Bankstown and Brisbane before you go off and advertise it in Beijing, Bombay and Beirut.

Then we had the Minister for Immigration and Multicultural Affairs saying in the other place, ‘What a terrible thing for the member for Watson to say.’ I took this charge very seriously: she said it was xenophobic. I take that charge seriously. Ministers in this government would know exactly what is xenophobic. If only the person who treats people in detention the way she has had any idea what the Minister for Health and Ageing was saying in this chamber at the exact same time that she was making that charge. She suggested that I instead should point to what must be major sources of immigration, though I was not aware of this. Blackpool, Brighton and Bristol were the places that the minister wanted me to refer to. I thought, why would she mention those places? Then today a news article appeared in the well-known online newspaper Blackpool Today, apparently a very well-known newspaper site in the United Kingdom. The article is dated yesterday but with the time difference it appeared this morning. It refers to a shop owner by the name of Andrew Robb.

I then understood why the minister was talking about the need to point to Blackpool. You think of the wages that the system will create and then realise Andrew Robb is the owner of the Bargain Shop—‘cheaper than cheap’. In Blackpool Today he was complaining about what was happening. He said:

Obviously it isn’t going to help.

The cheaper than cheap wages that are going to result from this are not going to be helpful to the young apprentices coming here from overseas and they are certainly going to drive down wages for the few young Australians left who are able to get an apprenticeship. The parliamentary secretary thinks not advertising locally is fine. He is the one member of the government to fess up and not have a problem at all if your management decision is that you do not need to advertise locally—you do not need to tell the young people of Ballarat that there is a job available in Ballarat, you do not need to tell the young people of the Tweed that there is a job available in the Tweed and you do not need to tell the young people of Adelaide that there is an apprenticeship available in Adelaide.

That is the attitude of the parliamentary secretary on this, which I think is the attitude of the government. All the others were a little bit too experienced to not just bluff it through, but he decided to be upfront with it. Then he started in his speech to do some fudging of his own—hard to believe, I know. He started to defend the trade skills training visa, which we know from the media coverage has come in and now applies to all of regional Australia at the request of one business. One business requests this visa; it has a devastating impact on training opportunities for young Australians in regional Australia, which happen to be the same areas where youth unemployment is at its absolute highest, and the parliamentary secretary tries to bluff and pretend when asked in an interjection how many companies asked for it. He said, ‘Oh, it was in response to requests from regional industries. I want to acknowledge the initiative.’ Then he names the one company involved. But he said ‘regional industries’. The Deputy Leader of the Opposition then asked, ‘We’ve heard of them. Who else?’ The response was, ‘There is a whole swag of applications for apprenticeships coming in. You can see the list. Go and look for yourself. This is going to be a very popular scheme. I don’t have, off the top of my head, the names of the 15 or 20 companies. No, I’m sorry but those opposite can have access to the list.’ So we rang the parliamentary secretary’s office and asked for the list only to get a call back from Dr Nation, the minister’s chief of staff, to say, ‘What on earth is it that you want?’ The list has not arrived.

I presume the parliamentary secretary was telling the truth and that we can have access to the list he is refusing access to. I presume the parliamentary secretary was telling the truth and did not just feel the pressure of the interjections yesterday. I presume that he did not just feel the pressure of knowing that he is doing something that is bad for young Australians who are trying to get training opportunities and that he was not just feeling a little bit of pressure about driving wages down in Australia. I presume that he was not just feeling a little bit of pressure about the way in which we are already seeing the cutting edge of the new industrial relations laws come out in the treatment of immigrants who have come here on work visas. We are seeing the first cases of genuine exploitation in the papers day after day and many are in those regional areas. We only have to look at the examples that have been appearing in the Adelaide Advertiser so far to see how we are getting the sharp edge of these industrial relations changes coming through. So the parliamentary secretary refers to a list that apparently does not exist because the minister previously had already acknowledged that this was done at the request of one company.

Instead of doing something at the request of one company, Labor says why not do something at the request of 300,000 young Australians turned away from TAFE? Why not do something at the request of young people wanting an apprenticeship? Because when you take an apprenticeship away from someone locally, you are not just saying, ‘Okay, they miss out on a job for a few months.’ You are actually saying, ‘They miss out on a career. They miss out on the trade that comes at the end of the apprenticeship.’ You are actually denying them the path that they are wanting to take for the rest of their life in the name of cheap wages and for what? Simply so that they can give a result to one company—not surprisingly a labour hire company—and one company alone. Three hundred thousand people have been turned away from TAFE since 1998. That is the exact sort of example that I imagine the now Deputy Prime Minister was complaining about in 1992. He looked for a tradesperson to do a particular job, searched Australia and could not find one.

Do not pretend for a minute that you can blame the economy on the reason that there is a skills shortage at the moment. The planning has not been done. There are occupations on the skills shortage list that have been there for 10 years. The planning has not been done. Youth unemployment rates are at the highest in the same regions where this visa will apply. The planning has not been done. There is 35 per cent youth unemployment in regions and they are the same regions from which the parliamentary secretary opposite wants to send those opportunities overseas.

It is completely different to what happens when you have overseas students because you can do that with additional places. You can add places on. But for every apprenticeship, you need an employer and there is going to be a finite number of employers available at any point in time. You do not need an employer for every university place but you do for every apprenticeship. In the same regions where young people are being denied these opportunities, where unemployment rates for young people are the highest in the country, this government says it is okay to have the trade skills training visa. What does it mean? It means an employer can decide that they can get cheaper labour overseas. But they have to get approval. To establish that approval, do they have to advertise the position? No. Do they have to make reasonable efforts to fill that particular position? No. They are not asked to certify that they have made any efforts to fill that particular position. So they are able to apply to the government, get a visa and deny those opportunities to young Australians. There is no nexus made between people available overseas and the employers so, unless you are a really large employer, you are going to be compelled to go through a labour hire company to find people. That is what this is about. This is part of the push of people onto labour hire companies.

At the end of it we know what will happen. If you have a young Australian in an apprenticeship position then, at the end of their apprenticeship, you have a tradesman or a tradeswoman remaining in Australia. Nine times out of 10, they will remain in Australia. We know full well we will not get those sorts of stats from people who have come from overseas to train. At the end, when you finally have a skilled tradesperson, will our skills crisis be any better? Not by one job. Because you have actually occupied an apprenticeship that you could have filled if you had bothered to connect people within Australia, instead of just making profits for labour hire companies by connecting people from overseas. You end up with a situation where those connections are not made and, instead of having the position filled and having a skilled tradesperson in Australia at the end of the period of the apprenticeship, nine times out of 10 you are going to find they have gone back to the country from which they came. That is not the way to manage a skills crisis.

These people are going to be exploited. We are going to see exploitation on the ground. They have to pay up-front fees. They even have to pay their own employer subsidy. You can imagine the sorts of wages and conditions in those circumstances that are going to be offered on a take it or leave it basis. They will have no negotiating power. What the Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations, at the table, has done to every young Australian is bad enough where, if you are offered an AWA, you take it or you lose the job. For these individuals, it is, ‘Take it or you lose the job and the right to enter Australia at all.’ They have no negotiating power. It is going to be a race to the bottom on wages. As far as the government is concerned, I guess it is going to be win-win: save money on training Australians and drive wages down. That is something Labor cannot support and never will. (Time expired)

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