Bruce Baird (Cook, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is my pleasure to support the Migration Amendment (Employer Sanctions) Bill 2006. I listened for some 30 minutes to the member for Watson. He took a long time to say that he was actually supporting it. He got somewhat distracted by his attack on the government over 457 visas and by the occasional mention of sexual slavery. With regard to 457 visas, if you talk to employers about labour shortages—as we have during the inquiry of the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Economics, Finance and Public Administration into Australian manufacturing exports and imports—you will find they are crying out for people to assist them short term in trying to find skilled labour. You will recognise that, despite the Labor Party’s ideological blinkers, people are saying this is the way to go when you have unemployment as low as it is because of the success of the government’s economic measures.

The member for Watson’s concern is really focusing on the micro level—that this will not do much for people on 457 visas who consider they are exploited—when the reality is that this is dealing with, as the department says, those 46,000 overstayers, some 25,000 of whom have been assessed as having been here perhaps longer than five years. What do we have? A focus on a very minute area of policy that has been generally very successful. In industry—whether it is the service sector or the manufacturing sector—people are saying that we have a major skills shortage. If the member for Watson got out there and talked to industry, instead of talking to his ideological mates, they would tell him what the problems are.

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