Nick Champion (Wakefield, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister. I know how keen he is to always hear my speeches in this place. As the member for Swan says, it was very generous. He is a picture of generosity, of bipartisanship, in this place. I probably have not helped his preselection or his standing in Liberal Party branches by saying that, but he is always very convivial in this House.

In my comments, I made it pretty clear what I think about the Social Services Legislation Amendment (Youth Employment and Other Measures) Bill 2015. One of the things I was talking about was entry-level jobs and my own experiences and the experiences out there in the community. We have so many people in my electorate who really do try hard to get entry-level jobs, who apply and apply and apply again. Sometimes you hear of people doing 40 or 50 applications a week. It is not unknown for young workers without experience to try and do that. It is very, very tough to get your start in an industry. The other group who never stop applying are those mature age workers—often men but not exclusively men—who, after a very long period of their working life, having worked right the way through, find themselves made redundant and find it very hard to get a job in another industry. Often they are prepared to not be job snobs, to actually get out there and apply and to do the rough jobs that I did in my youth—fruit picking and the like. People are often pretty keen to do that.

That is why it is so disturbing when I talk to union officials like Tony Snelson of the National Union of Workers—who was on the ABC, on the Four Corners program—and he tells me that there are employers who have arrangements, particularly related to the 417 visa, the backpacker visa, that are taking vast swathes of entry-level jobs out of the system, out of the labour market. That is the effect of them. D'VineRipe are an employer in my electorate, and they have now written to me and communicated with me and assured me that they are taking every step to try and eliminate some of the practices that were highlighted in the Four Corners program. I thank them for that, because in the past I have been a supporter of some of their projects, based on the employment that they will generate in my electorate. And we need jobs in my electorate, after this government's treatment of the car industry.

We want to make sure that there are entry-level jobs out there. That is why it is so distressing to read on the ABC website and to see on the 7.30 program, Lateline and Four Corners issues around Baiada chicken-processing plants and the high use of 417 visas. In one ABC report, by Jason Om—it is there on the website—there are reports of workers working up to 18 hours a day without overtime. The Deputy Fair Work Ombudsman, Michael Campbell, is quoted as telling Lateline:

I don't believe that any worker in this country should be forced to work in those types of circumstances nor endure those types of practices by any employer.

An ombudsman report that found much of the work was done 'off the books', with the foreign workers paid in cash. Mr Campbell equated it, in one instance, to syndicated crime. Mr Campbell said, in relation to the fact that some companies—mainly labour hire companies—provided fabricated records or vanished altogether:

Unfortunately what this means for our investigation is that it's very hard to pin down an individual to hold accountable. In many ways, what we see is like syndicated crime. You take one player out and another steps into their shoes.

This is a major employer in this country, a major company that provides chickens to nearly every supermarket—it is hard to buy chicken in this country without coming across Baiada Group's labels: Lilydale and the like—and yet we have these egregious work practices in entry-level jobs. When a person is employed in these conditions on a 417 visa, it in effect denies an entry-level job to a young Australian—a South Australian, a Victorian or a New South Welshman—or indeed a mature age worker. It denies them the opportunity to apply for that job. And it is not just the ABC that is making these findings. If you look at the statement of findings on Baiada Group by the Fair Work Ombudsman—and this is from the Fair Work website, something those opposite should avail themselves of—it says:

Baiada refused permission for Fair Work inspectors working on this Inquiry to access the factory floor at its worksites, denying them an opportunity to observe work practices, as well as talk to employees about conditions, policies and procedures.

Baiada also failed to provide the Inquiry with any “significant or meaningful” documentation on the nature and terms of its labour contract arrangements.

However, the Inquiry found that employees working at Baiada sites are not being paid their lawful entitlements.

The company had verbal agreements with an extensive list of labour-hire operators used to source most of its workers, largely 417 working holiday visa-holders from Taiwan and Hong Kong.

Baiada’s labour-hire contractors were unwilling to engage with the Inquiry and produced inadequate, inaccurate and/or fabricated records to Inspectors.

So here we have the Fair Work Ombudsman, which is an agency of the executive arm of government empowered by this parliament to make sure that Australian workers get fair entitlements, yet what do we find? We find a major Australian company deliberately obstructing the investigations of the Fair Work Ombudsman. This is an outrage and it should be seen as such. Then we have this bill denying young Australians any income at all and those opposite talking about young Australians having to do unpaid work experience around the place in the hope that some employer will give them a job. We all know circumstances where that has been good and we have all seen circumstances where that has been bad. But to have this company, which is employing a lot of workers at entry level, behaving in this way while the government brings this bill into the House is utterly egregious. If you think Australians are going to cop this sort of circumstance, you have another thing coming. The bill is manifestly unfair and completely at odds with our traditions of a fair go.

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