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

I move:

That this House:

(1) notes:

(a) the recent media investigation on the ABC program Four Corners about the abuse of 7 Eleven employees;

(b) complaints against the 7-Eleven franchise included employees being underpaid and forced to breach their visa requirements and work very long hours without a break; and

(c) these reports and the employment practices of 7-Eleven franchisees have caused significant community concern which must be addressed; and

(2) calls on the Government to:

(a) take immediate action to address the abuse of workers across the 7-Eleven franchise network; and

(b) ensure that workers that were forced by their employers to breach their visa conditions are not penalised.

It is good to be speaking on this motion in the House today. Obviously, Australia has prided itself on being a nation of a fair go, and that is a very important thing for our nation's psychology. But we cannot be the nation of a fair go unless we have a system of wages in this country which has integrity and a system of immigration and visas which has integrity. These two things are fundamental—absolutely fundamental, I think—to our view of ourselves as a country. We certainly cannot be the country of a fair go if we have an immigration system interacting with a wages system which produces something like modern serfdom. We cannot be the nation of a fair go if that is the case.

Recently, due to the good work of the ABC and the good work of the Fairfax press—and both the ABC and the Fairfax press get a bit of a hard time from ministers in this government from time to time—they did the nation a service when they published and broadcast very serious allegations about the 7-Eleven group, which basically revolved around the abuse of both visa conditions and our wages system.

Of course, they featured the rather harrowing story of Sam Pendem, who had to work shifts of up to 16 hours at 7-Eleven without a break. He was robbed twice in the space of 18 hours by a man in a balaclava, brandishing a long serrated knife; he was scolded by his employer for not fighting the robber—not fighting back to stop the robber from taking $180; he was paid somewhere between $10 an hour at one store and $14 an hour at another store; he had to do the job of two people; and, often, if someone drove off without paying for their petrol he basically had to foot the bill for the lost petrol costs. Of course, all of those things—the long hours he worked and the conditions in which he worked—also put him in breach of the visa conditions that he was in Australia under. He was an overseas student. As The Sydney Morning Herald, which I just quoted from, pointed out, this arrangement, which was known as a 'half-pay' scam, put Mr Pendem in breach of his own visa conditions.

The half-pay scammers know that students can work up to 20 hours on their visas. What was going on here, apparently—according to these reports—was that people worked twice as many hours at effectively the same rate, which made it half the pay. It would appear as if they were working 20 hours on the book but in actual fact they were sometimes working double that. A 7-Eleven insider was quoted as saying:

They can’t run 7-Eleven as profitably as successfully as they have without letting this happen, … but the reality is it’s built on something not much different from slavery

So, according to the ABC and Fairfax Media, that is the model on which, 7-Eleven are operating at the moment. I notice that they now have Mr Allan Fels undertaking investigations to clean up some of those issues that have occurred in their stores. But you would have to say that if a franchise model is built on these sorts of scams then that should attract the attention of the government.

But what have we seen from this government? We have seen no leadership, no press releases, no task force, no new laws, no new action and no urgency. They have been content to let departmental spokespeople talk about proposing amnesties. But we have not seen one iota of action from this government. It would seem that they are happy to allow this to occur—this stain on our nation's character. And we cannot be the country of a 'fair go' if we are allowing modern-day serfdom and modern-day slavery to be undertaken by people who are little more than guest workers. They are here on student visas, or backpacker visas or some other visa category, but more often than not they are here to work. And more often than not their employer is hanging that visa over their heads as a method to get leverage, to underpay them and to have them fulfil conditions that we do not think are right. So the government has to act on these matters.

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