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

It is amazing how quickly this government gets defensive when it is realised that it is failing one of its essential responsibilities. Labor has been accused of all sorts of things by government ministers for pursuing this. We even had Peter Hendy saying that the Labor Party was being racist in wanting to defend Australian jobs. To Peter Hendy I have two words of rebuttal: children overboard. We will not be lectured to by people who have been the architects of appealing to the worst elements in society; we simply want to do one thing and one thing only—defend opportunities for young Australians.

We want to make sure that young Australians do get the chance to undertake apprenticeships. We want to make sure that the industrial relations laws are not being used to bring in imported labour, which is being used to drive wages directly down. We do not want to see a continuation of the situation where the number of people being brought in under the skilled migration scheme matches the number of people who are turned away from TAFE—because, quite simply, defending Australian jobs is the government’s job. It is actually the government’s job to provide opportunities for its own citizens. Labor is going to continue to argue as we have that this visa category for apprenticeships should never have been established in the first place, that it is bad policy and that, as Kim Beazley made clear at this dispatch box on the Thursday night following the budget, it will be dispensed with under a Labor government. There will be no apprenticeship visas. The trade skills training visa will be gone and gone for good.

This scheme has nothing to do with skilled migration. The government keeps trying to cloak this as a skilled migration initiative. A new apprentice is not a skilled immigrant. A new apprentice is someone who has come here to take on a skill. And what happens to them at the end of their apprenticeship? Odds on that a very high number will decide to go back to the country from which they came. So at the end of these apprenticeships, after migrants have occupied them for three to five years, the skills crisis in Australia is no better off, because, instead of having somebody who would stay in Australia and occupy that spot in the Australian workforce, the apprenticeship has been taken. And there are always a limited number of apprenticeships available.

The Minister for Immigration and Multicultural Affairs wants to liken this to providing extra opportunities for overseas students to study at university. It is completely different. When you add on extra university places for overseas students, you do not have a finite number, but for every apprentice you do not just need a position at TAFE; you also need to create a job. There are a finite number of employers in a position to take on apprentices. So Labor has argued, and we will continue to argue, that if a position is available in Ballarat it ought to be advertised in Ballarat. And, if you cannot fill it in Ballarat, you do not go straight offshore. If you cannot fill it in Ballarat, you advertise it in Bendigo, in Brisbane and around the country to provide opportunities for people in Australia before you hand it over to Beijing, Beirut, Bombay, Bristol, Birmingham, Belfast or anywhere else in the world—for no reason other than it is the government’s job to provide opportunities for young Australians. It is a simple job for the government to provide opportunities for young Australians.

The government might want to walk away from that; the government might want to attempt all sorts of sleight of hand and pretend it is the same as bringing in overseas students—it is not. Only a limited number of apprenticeships will ever be available in Australia and you have an endless stream of young Australians wanting those opportunities. Yet the government says, ‘Oh, but this is all about skilled migration; this is all about a solution to the crisis in qualified workers.’ It does nothing to fix the skills crisis, because at the end, if a young Australian filled that apprenticeship, odds on they would stay in the country and at that point you would have a qualified tradesperson to help Australian industry, particularly in regional areas. But, instead of going down that path, the government goes down the alternative path and says, ‘We’ll just bring people in from overseas.’ At the end of it the skills crisis is no better off. It is not about skilled migration—it is not about responding to the skills crisis—it is about taking opportunities away from young Australians.

There is no example more shameful than the fact that you do not even have to advertise a position locally. The Treasurer and Acting Prime Minister has tried to defend the visa on the basis that the regional certifying bodies are established and certified by state governments. What he neglects to mention—and he has had a few goes at it over the last two days in question time—is that the criteria which the states have to make an assessment under are set by the Commonwealth. So, sure, the bodies that give the rubber stamp at the end are accredited by the states, but the criteria they have to apply is completely set by the Commonwealth. It is defined by the Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs.

The department of immigration seems confused enough itself as to what the criteria are. It listed four yesterday: the migration occupations in demand list, whether or not there is a state or territory shortage list, whether the vacancy had been advertised on a website, and whether or not there had been a local shortage in that region. But then, asked if one would have to satisfy all four, the department of immigration did not know. The department does not know whether you have to satisfy all four or maybe one, or maybe it is just the vibe that you have to apply across that set of criteria. But the criteria are set by the Commonwealth. The Commonwealth could very easily say, ‘One criterion will be: you have to advertise the position locally and, if you cannot fill it locally, you have to advertise it in neighbouring regions.’ It is completely open to the Commonwealth to make that one of the criteria. That is all that the Commonwealth would have to do, and then the state registered bodies would immediately have the authority to apply the new criteria.

But the Commonwealth government do not do that, and they do not do it for one very simple reason: they do not want the opportunities to be taken by young Australians because they do not want people to be paid the going rate; they want people to be paid the lowest possible rate available under the new industrial relations scheme. That is where the exploitation of workers who come here on work visas does not just affect those workers; it affects the new going rate for all Australian workers because that sets the new lower benchmark. All they would have to do is change the criteria.

So, when the parliamentary secretary speaks after me in this debate, instead of giving the run that he normally gives of, ‘This is all because Labor’s connected with the unions and therefore its motivation is intrinsically evil,’ and instead of running the argument that we know we are going to hear, ‘Oh, but these are state rubber-stamp bodies and therefore it is all their fault,’ he should answer one simple question: why won’t the government insist in its criteria that you have to advertise the job in Australia?

It is a very simple question. From the day this visa was put into regulations, Labor went out and said that you should have to advertise the position locally and that, if you cannot fill it locally, you should have to advertise the position in neighbouring regions. Not once has the government had the guts to stand up and defend what the circumstances would be in which it would be fair to not advertise a position locally. They will not defend it, and yet they will not change it either. They will not change it for the simple reason that, if it is driving wages down, it is doing the job they asked it to do. If it is denying opportunities to young Australians, then it is doing the job they wanted it to do.

If the government does not want the apprenticeship visa to drive wages down, if it does not want young Australians to miss out on TAFE opportunities and apprenticeship opportunities because of this visa, then it should change the criteria. The government should not blame state registered bodies for not applying criteria that do not exist. If the government wants them to apply the criteria, the government should put them in the regulations. That is all the government has to do, and it will not.

We can see exactly how effectively this visa works to drive wages down. The Treasurer has stood up a couple of times in the last couple of days wanting to defend it, and he has claimed that any apprentice who is seeking a visa to undertake training in Australia could only get one if a regional certifying body certified that no suitable Australian was available. That is not one of the criteria. That you even have to advertise and check whether an Australian is available is not on the form. Nowhere on the form is there an instruction to the regional certifying bodies.

If the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Immigration and Multicultural Affairs wants to fudge it, he has to live with the fact that before estimates hearings yesterday the representatives from the department of immigration thought that there were four criteria. They did not know whether you had to apply one of them or whether you had to apply all four, but they did know that advertising the position locally was not on the list. They did know that advertising the position locally had nothing to do with whether or not you would get the rubber stamp and have the opportunity to bring someone in under this visa.

It is no small argument at the time of a skills crisis that we want to make sure that at the end of every apprenticeship we have a qualified worker in Australia. At the beginning of every apprenticeship we want to make sure that we have given the best possible opportunities to young Australians. Labor is going to continue to argue for providing the best possible opportunities for young Australians because it is the right thing to do. It is what an Australian government is meant to do—not provide the lowest possible wages to industry but provide the best possible opportunities for Australians.

The government’s approach is fundamentally different to ours. This difference forms one of the key divides between that side of the House and this side of the House. We will defend opportunities for young Australians. We will oppose legislation which drives wages down. We want to make sure that every apprenticeship is advertised locally. We are not going to allow the government to get away with saying that, because the rubber stamp is given by state authorities, therefore they set the criteria. The criteria are set by the ministers who sit opposite. The criteria are set by the people who sit in the cabinet room, of whom the parliamentary secretary is not yet one. Ministers who have sat around the cabinet room have refused to do the decent thing that Australians believe they ought to do. Australians believe that you ought to advertise a position locally. Australians believe that the government ought to make every effort to provide apprenticeship opportunities for young Australians.

I invite the parliamentary secretary, as he gets up here, not to dodge it—to be fair dinkum and explain. When is it fair not to advertise the position locally? If the government cannot do that, why will it not insist that advertising the position locally be part of a set of criteria that the regional certifying bodies apply? The parliamentary secretary knows full well that it is not on the form, that it is not in their instructions, that it was not on the list of four that went to estimates yesterday. As one of the people charged to defend the new industrial relations laws, he knows what driving wages down is all about.

Driving wages down is something Labor will not support. Denying opportunities to young Australians is something Labor will never do. This apprenticeship visa came about as an idea from one company and one company alone. In order to curry favour initially with one business in Australia, we now have thousands of young Australians wanting to get into an apprenticeship but missing out on that opportunity.

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