Adam Bandt (Melbourne, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to make a few remarks in opposing the Migration Amendment (Offshore Resources Activity) Bill. Resources in Australia, including in Australia's exclusive economic zone, are there to be used for the benefit of this country, first and foremost. Over many years, when it comes to a lot of those resources, the bulk of the benefits have been flowing overseas. In the mining sector, 83 per cent of the profits flow overseas, largely to institutional shareholders, there are similar problems when it comes to Australia as a country, and including Australia's workers, getting a fair share from the resources under our oceans as well. The thing about these resources is you only get to dig them up or extract them and sell them once. Once they are gone, they are gone. You would hope that in the process of doing that, we would ensure that people in Australia, in the Commonwealth of Australia and the states of Australia, receive a fair return. We are finding that that is not happening. We may well wake up on the other side of this mining and resources boom to find that we are a hollowed out, uneducated quarry. It is not just the profits that have gone overseas but the profits that have been left here were squandered by successive generations of Liberal and Labor governments. Instead of putting the profits away for some day in the future when the rest of the world tells us to stop digging, we have spent and spent and spent, and it will come back and haunt us.

More than that, there is a real question about whether local workers in Australia are getting a fair share of the benefits from this resources boom. There is a very real risk that we are going to wake up and find that the profits have not been invested in transitioning us to the clean energy society that will set us up well for the 21st century. There is also a very real risk that we will wake up and find that the skills have gone overseas as well—in other words, the once in a generation chance to train up a body of people in the skills needed for construction, manufacturing and maintenance will have passed us by. There have been several attacks on this front. There has been the exploitation and overuse of 457 visas. Our approach here is from this principle. The Greens have no problem in saying that if you cannot find someone locally for a job, you should be able to bring someone in from overseas. We have no problem with that at all. But we do think that you should look locally first. Part of the problem has been that there has been no obligation to look locally first.

This legislation relates to a decision that a lot of people in this country would be quite stunned about. They probably would not have expected that the practice was happening in the first place or that the existing legislation fixed the problem. The Allseas decision of the Federal Court said this about an offshore resources platform that may be within Australia's Exclusive Economic Zone and may be extracting Australian resources and then sending them off somewhere else, but certainly someone would be making money from them: provided the vessel does not actually connect with that platform and pulls away again, people on that vessel do not need to be covered by Australian wages and conditions. That would come as a shock to very many people, that in Australia's Exclusive Economic Zone they are extracting Australia's resources and they do not have to apply Australian labour law as the minimum standard.

Legislation to close that loophole was passed through the last parliament which we proudly supported. It simply said that if you are working in Australia's Exclusive Economic Zone extracting Australian resources, you apply Australian labour laws. It should not be that hard. Of course along comes this government and they want to repeal that protection. They want to make it so that when you are extracting Australian resources, it does not matter that there are no locals employed on that project and it does not matter that the people who are employed on the project might be employed on half the wages and conditions that apply under Australian law. They do not care because, as we have heard from the last speaker, all they need to hear is a list of submissions from big business that says, 'We'll make a bit more money if we do it this way,' and that is enough for them.

This legislation is especially needed in the maritime industry because, by their very nature, ships and resources activity are mobile. This legislation ignores the specifics of this industry. In my experience, certainly before coming to this place but also since then, when I have been representing many Australian workers, especially low-paid workers as well as a number of unions, you hear example after example of local workers turning up to work on ships only to find that there is an existing crew from a country that is not as rich as Australia and are paid less. They find an existing crew already signed up with an existing enterprise agreement. I do not fault the people who are coming here from other countries seeking to better their own lives. But what is happening is that the floor, the minimum set of wages and conditions, is being lowered. Those people should be entitled to Australian minimum wages and conditions as well, and it is not happening. Instead, this government are saying: 'How low can we make the bar? How quickly can we make the floor rot so that there is no longer a uniform set of minimum wages and conditions in Australia?'

The idea that we can start carving out bits of this country where fewer protections apply is something that previous Labor and Liberal governments have form on when it comes to migration laws. They cannot move quickly enough to say bits of Australia are not Australia and therefore the same human rights standards do not apply. But now we are seeing that same philosophy creeping into our industrial relations laws. If this legislation passes, it will just increase the race to the bottom. People who come here to work will be on substantially lower wages and conditions than what would apply under Australian labour law. That does two things. It puts those people who have come here to work under extraordinary pressure. They will be subject to incredible exploitation and they know they will be able to be flicked back to where they came from if they misbehave. But more than that, it lowers the floor for everyone in this country. If this legislation passes and if you are running an offshore oil or gas platform, why on earth would you employ an Australian resident if you have to pay Australian labour laws when you can just ship someone in from elsewhere and pay them half as much? That is ultimately what this legislation is about. The government needs to answer to the people whose wages, conditions and jobs it is attacking through this legislation. I have no doubt, as we heard from previous speakers, that there is a long list of big business representatives who want this legislation passed. They will make even more money if this legislation gets passed. But the losers will be not only the people who cannot work on those platforms anymore but all workers here, because the minimum level of wages and conditions in this country will start to drop. That is ultimately what this legislation is about. For that reason we will be opposing it.

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