Alannah Mactiernan (Perth, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I cannot believe what we have heard here today in this debate on the Migration Amendment (Offshore Resources Activity) Repeal Bill 2014. The surrender monkeys of Australian jobs are at it again, falling over themselves one after another to get up here and to justify stripping back great opportunities for Australian employment. Let us be very clear about this: this is not an argument against 457 visas. The Labor government legislation, which we are here defending today, protects Australian jobs by saying that if you want to bring in workers to work on our oil and gas installations, you need to establish that there is no Australian who is capable of doing that. Under all of this language that has been used about deregulation, today we have a proposal, saying that we are in fact going to have open slather on our oil and gas industry.

I thought the member for Durack made some quite appalling statements, basically suggesting that Australians did not have the capacity to do these sorts of jobs and therefore we need to allow people to come in. We are the second biggest exporter of oil and gas around the world. The question has to be asked: why are we not developing this capacity? We should be the centres of excellence, of skill development in oil and gas, not putting up our hands and saying, 'No, we can't do that work; we're going to allow those well-paid jobs to be taken offshore.'

There is a particular stupidity about this proposal that is ignoring a development in this industry, a development which I have been prepared, as has my colleague the member for Brand, to support as the industry moves towards floating LNG platforms. This technology has indeed been of considerable concern to the unions and also to some of my erstwhile colleagues in the state parliament. But, quite frankly, we are taking the pragmatic approach that this appears to be the technology of the future and that we have to go with that technology. But the way in which we ensure that this is viable, that it is a good outcome for the Australian community, is to ensure that the jobs on those LNG platforms are indeed jobs for Australians. This is not insignificant.

Figures have been quoted today by various members. I think the member for Canning and the member for Durack talked about there not being very many people concerned about this matter and that we are talking of only a couple of thousand jobs and even that is probably at the high end. I put it to you that, firstly, we should be looking very carefully at even a couple of thousand very well-paid jobs. And, secondly, we have to be very mindful of the direction in which the industry is going.

I am going to talk a little bit about the scale of the floating LNG industry that is emerging. In Western Australia in particular we are very conscious of this because we are seeing the first project in Australia that will be coming on stream, hopefully in the next couple of years, with the Shell Prelude project off the Kimberley coast.

APPEA projects that investment in floating LNG in Australia could top $65 billion over the next six years. That is a massive industry, which is a complete transformation of the way in which we have done offshore oil and gas in the past. It means that the jobs go offshore and that the vast bulk of the jobs that are associated with the oil and gas industry will be offshore jobs. And now we have the surrender monkeys in here tonight, telling us that we are not even going to require a 457 visa—

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