Sharman Stone (Murray, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Immigration and Citizenship) Share this | Hansard source

It is not wrong. There are a number of families of skilled worker backgrounds who have dependants with conditions like Down syndrome, and I have those families’ names in my office. I include another family who recently communicated with the minister. They have been waiting for a decision for more than 12 months in relation to entering the country on a skilled worker visa, but they, too, have a Down syndrome son.

The problem is that our skilled worker program does depend on the department and the minister acting decisively, efficiently and quickly in all cases. We are losing competitiveness when more than 50 per cent of our skilled worker 457 visa category families are leaving the country. I suggest that a lot of that may be where cases did not receive careful and efficient attention as soon as the matters were put on the table.

In 1996 we introduced the 457 visa category and this was, indeed, a great success. The annual intake for the 457 visa program has steadily increased from 16,550 in 1997-98 to 22,370 in 2003-04 to 58,050 in 2007-08. The Senate report sets out these statistics. In this 11-year period, 304,400 section 457 visas were granted. In addition these visas allow secondary visas for interdependent partners, dependent children or other relatives of the section 457 visa holder. This brought the total number of visas granted under this umbrella to 550,600.

There are currently nearly 19,000 employers using the 457 visas. Nearly 30 per cent of 457s are employed in New South Wales. The New South Wales government and state governments generally are some of the most prolific users of 457 visas—in particular in the health sector. It is interesting that the Labor opposition at the time, now the Rudd Labor government, regularly opposed the 457 visa system and mounted scare campaigns about this being a backdoor way to bring in cheaper workers who would drive down Australian labour wages and conditions.

We had a very interesting situation with the Barbara Deegan report, which was reviewing the integrity of the actual operation of the 457 visa program. I have already said that I thought it was a very good report that Barbara Deegan delivered. Interestingly, she does not identify in any place in that report how many breaches of obligation actually occurred with these 457 employees. She suggests that there is probably an under-representation of breaches of obligations, and I am quite sure that is probably true, but we do have to make sure that we do not place very punitive and high-cost new obligations on the employer sponsors when in fact the vast majority do the right thing. Instead, what we need to be doing is focusing on the category of 457 visa holders who, it would seem, are more likely to be exploited or have other problems. These are the 457 visa holders who have lower pay and tend to work in hospitality, tourism or sometimes in other industry sectors which appear more likely to employ non-English-speaking background labour. As Barbara Deegan suggests, for the sake of DIAC’s efficiency, we have to look at streaming future 457 visa holders into two categories: those above, say, $100,000 in wages and those below, with more scrutiny and monitoring of the lower paid category to make sure they are not vulnerable and in no way exploited.

I am also concerned that at the moment some people who have already spent two or three years on a 457 visa are experiencing some difficulty asking for and receiving the support of their sponsors to obtain permanency in Australia. It is a problem. The sponsor understands that, in supporting their 457 worker for permanency, they may lose that worker as that worker may relocate into other employment. I think Barbara Deegan was right in identifying that there should be other pathways for 457 visa holders to move from sponsorship under 457 visas to permanency.

I also strongly support her recommendation that there be 90 days allowed if a 457 visa holder wishes to be re-engaged by another sponsor. This will empower the worker and their family so that, if they have some problems with the current employer or simply find where they are working not to be to their absolute satisfaction and they have a better offer somewhere else in Australia, they can shift to another employer without having imposed on them any penalties or any threat of having their visa status changed, discounted or in some way removed because their current employer does not want to lose them.

I think Barbara Deegan’s recommendation that talked about the importance of the families, or secondary visa holders, being supported to learn English was also very sound. I am aware of the case of some meatworkers in South Australia. They came out as Chinese speakers and their families have enjoyed very much the regional community where they are located, but when they go to apply for permanency their lack of English will be an impediment. As well, the families know that they could be better integrated and enjoy more of the opportunities Australia offers if they could learn English while the breadwinner of the family worked at the local meatworks. So I certainly do support Barbara Deegan’s recommendation in relation to English language teaching for families as well as for the workers themselves, who for safety purposes, of course, need to be able to understand and respond to instructions in English.

This year DIAC released a discussion paper which describes all of the options, as they put it, for the regulations associated with 457 visas. I will run through some of the options because the employer sponsor community has raised some alarm and had concerns about the additional costs and the red tape they would incur if these options were to come through as regulations. I referred earlier in my remarks to the issues with the cost and red tape. The proposed new obligations described in the DIAC discussion paper released in April 2008 include the sponsor meeting all of the education costs of minors accompanying the worker; covering all medical costs, either through insurance or direct payment, including covering medical costs where the insurance company refuses to pay; paying any migration agent’s fees or other costs of recruitment up to a maximum specified; paying all travel costs to Australia, where before only travel from Australia was required; and paying any licence or registration fees associated with the worker taking up employment in Australia. Those are just some of the options outlined in the DIAC paper.

You can understand the employer sponsors focusing rather intently on those proposals. Along with Barbara Deegan, I am concerned at the growing trend of offshore agents engaged in identifying skilled temporary visa respondents for job vacancies in Australia who charge a substantial amount for their spotting services and who sometimes give misinformation or incorrect information. It is important that we take all measures to ensure that offshore agents, or even onshore agents, giving misinformation are not encouraged and supported and rather that we have direct relationships between the department and the employer sponsors. Part of this could be that any agents’ fees charged for the future employee are met by the employer. In that way there would be greater transparency and any unfortunate developments in this area would be curtailed.

The Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry submitted that some of these proposed DIAC regulations would have a detrimental effect on Australian business, especially on small to medium enterprises, and that the cost of some of these measures would indeed be prohibitive for many businesses. They were also concerned that in the growing period of uncertainty in our Australian economy—where business confidence is at an all-time low, where orders are contracting and where the non-mining sector is doing it tough—Australian employers might decide to walk away from importing the skilled labour needs of their business, even though that will put further nails in their coffin because they cannot find the local workers to do the job that has to be done.

The Senate committee report found that about 89 per cent of the 457 visas granted were in the top three ASCO major groups of nominated occupations—namely, managers and administrators, professionals and associated professionals—but by 2007-08 this figure had dropped down to 80 per cent. In other words, there is a growing trend for slightly less skilled workers to be coming in on 457 visas and for these less skilled workers to go to smaller companies. I emphasise the importance of making sure that all of these workers are adequately protected under legislation, or in this case regulation, and that the costs of employing those people and the red tape are not overwhelming.

The section 140Q penalty for failure to satisfy sponsorship obligations enables the minister to apply to the Federal Court or the Federal Magistrates Court for a pecuniary penalty order against the person, resulting in a maximum penalty for an individual per offence of $6,600 and for a body corporate of $33,000. That does not seem unreasonable to me, but we have to make sure that there is full clarity about whether and how an element of fault will be required to be proved or what will categorise a breach and how that will properly be determined. There are no statutory defence options and there is no ministerial discretion apparent in this legislation.

We support the framework as identified in this bill. It was the coalition that introduced 457 temporary skilled worker visas in an effort to make sure that we could meet the demands of our industry and service sectors, which could not find adequate employees to grow their businesses. We have seen this 457 visa category grow exponentially. We have seen it evolve, with more people in the lower salary categories coming in of late. We absolutely agree that worker protection is paramount. There must not be one of these workers subjected to unsafe Australian workplaces. Exploitation of them in any way is to be abhorred. So we welcome the better codifying and defining of the sponsor obligations in relation to their workers’ protection.

What we are concerned about, though, as I said at the beginning, is that we do not know what the regulations will contain. We have been given a paper with a whole range of options. I have been told by departmental officials that perhaps that paper was too broad. I do not quite know what that means. Has there already been a decision or some decisions made about options in that paper, putting some to one side? If that is the case, let us have the debate about what is in the government’s mind. This is a very important issue. We want to get it right. The coalition will support this bill. But we will certainly be subjecting the regulations to very tight examination. (Time expired)

Debate (on motion by Dr Emerson) adjourned.

See this speech in context