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

The Attorney-General has just given a good speech on a different MPI. He has just created a very good case for why 457 visas should not be entirely abolished—a good case for it. The problem is that Labor does not think the 457 visa should be abolished. We have never called for that and we never will. You need to have a system of temporary work visas. You do not need a system that is managed—or mismanaged—in the way this one is. You do not need a system where you do not have to advertise a job locally. You do not need a system that allows some people to work side by side with others, doing an identical job to theirs, and to receive half their pay. You do not have to have a system that exploits people.

The situation of Jack Zhang, which has brought us here today, is nothing but exploitation. I find it extraordinary that, in response to our comments, today of all days the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry condemns trade union scaremongering on skilled migration. There is a problem with bringing that out on the day that the case of Jack Zhang is exposed. His employer confirmed every detail. Every detail that the Leader of the Opposition went through a couple of minutes ago was confirmed by the employer. What did the employer then do, having confirmed to a journalist from the Age every one of the details of the exploitation of this worker on a 457 visa? The employer then walked down the road. The journalist followed at a distance and watched as the employer evicted Mr Zhang then and there from his home. That is not some scaremongering campaign. Jack Zhang is a victim of the way the government wants 457 visas to work.

I really wish that I could use the line—because it is not a bad line—that the 457 visa system is out of control. The problem is that it is not. It is doing exactly what this government wants it to do. This government wants to have a system where people are being paid massively less than what current Australian market rates are. The Attorney-General commented just previously, ‘What’s changed in the last two years?’ Have a look at Misha Schubert’s column in the Age today entitled ‘457 visa numbers jump 66 per cent in three years’. We have had a massive increase in the number of people coming in on 457 visas at the same time that the government has ransacked the industrial relations system. These things have happened at the same time in order to open up a huge gap between the market rate being paid in Australia and the new minimum legal rate.

The minimum legal rate under a 457 visa goes at around the $42,000 mark. But the $42,000 mark, in the case of Mr Jack Zhang, is then further cut back. It is $42,000 less the $10,000 you pay to the agent in China and less a further $10,000 that you pay to your employer—to buy a job. $10,000 to buy a job. So, before he starts, already he is not at the $42,000 mark but effectively at the $22,000 mark—only to then find, when it comes to paying for his accommodation, the landlord he is paying is his employer.

What is going on here is a rort from beginning to end. The government wants to have arguments about why we should not get rid of all 457 visas because it wants to keep the whole package. What Labor wants to do is keep the genuine situations of need. It wants to keep the situation where nurses who come in on 457 visas are paid the same as the nurses they are working side by side with, where they are not exploited and where there is a genuine skills shortage—a skills shortage, I might add, that has happened to the states after years of asking and pleading for the federal government to provide more nursing training positions, which the federal government has refused to fund, and then ending up in a situation of having no choice—and, in those circumstances, to use these visas in a way that is not exploitative.

But the visas are open to exploitation and there are employers using them in that fashion. It is bad for the workers who get exploited on those visas. It is bad for the way it drives wages down for the people they are working side by side with. And it is bad for the mainstream, decent Australian employers who will not do that but who find their competitors are behaving that way. They then have to compete in an unfair market because, although they do not want to exploit people from overseas, to get a share of the market they are competing with companies that will.

There are three ways this visa is open to exploitation. The first is the inadequate policing. There is no effective policing at the time of application and, when it comes to the workplace, what policing does occur is completely scattergun. We hear about investigations that are done by the government. When does the investigation happen? When it is raised in parliament by the Labor Party, when it turns up in the mainstream media or when it is raised by a trade union. We do not hear about the cases coming up that have occurred through the normal policing methods of the department of immigration checking on the treatment of people on 457 visas.

The Attorney-General referred to the fact that there are not that many reported cases of abuse. That is not surprising. You do not have to speak English to be able to get the visa—and how likely are you to report exploitation if you are paid even less than what you are legally entitled to and if you believe that your employer has not only a right of dismissal but also an effective right of deportation? You are not going to complain. For the number of cases that get raised in this parliament or get reported to the media, there are many more that come to us anecdotally, come to us from people who work side by side with people who are scared and terrified that if they make a report—if they stand up—they will lose their jobs.

And you wonder why they are scared? Look at what happened to Mr Zhang. Within two minutes of his employer being interviewed by a journalist, he had lost his home. And the Attorney-General says, ‘We can all rest a little bit easier, because not that many cases of abuse get reported.’ That is part of the plan. That is part of the problem. That is why it is just as important for someone to have an English speaking test when they come on permanent migration as it is when they come on temporary migration. You cannot say it is important to get a job one week and the next week turn a blind eye to people who are brought in here without English skills when you know that it is part of the plan to stop them reporting abuse—to turn a blind eye to that when your real excuse is you want this sort of behaviour to occur to drive wages down.

The second problem with this visa goes beyond all issues of policing. There are things which are absolutely unacceptable to the Australian community that are legal under 457 visas. It is completely legal for a job to be advertised only in another country. You can have a job that is never advertised in Australia but is advertised overseas, and someone can come in on a 457 visa claiming shortage of local workforce without there ever being effective labour market testing. There are no effective tests done on skill. Mr Jack Zhang was brought over, and what skill did the employer end up getting him to perform? He was sweeping the floor! It is not being used by unscrupulous employers as a genuine attempt to fill skills shortages.

The third way in which this is being abused is it only respects the new minimum rates under either the immigration system or the new minimum lower rates, without penalty rates, allowed under Work Choices. The Australian market rate is well above that, and it does not take much to work out what happens when you introduce to the workforce some people working at half the rate of others. You do one thing: in those industries and at those workplaces, you drive wages down.

Mr Zhang was evicted, but there is another eviction that should take place. This government will not fix this visa system for the simple reason they believe in how this is happening. They believe in the abuses that are occurring; they want them to happen. Until we get the eviction from this place of the people who sit in the front row on the other side, this problem will not be fixed.

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