Tony Zappia (Makin, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Manufacturing) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That this House:

(1) notes that as at:

(a) 31 March 2015 there were over 106,000 primary Temporary Work (Skilled) (subclass 457) visa holders in Australia;

(b) 31 December 2014 there were over 160,000 Working Holiday (subclass 417) and Work and Holiday (subclass 462) visa holders in Australia; and

(c) 30 June 2014 there were an estimated 62,100 unlawful non-citizens in Australia;

(2) further notes that:

(a) in August 2015 there were around 780,000 Australians who were unemployed and that 280,000 of those were aged 15 to 24; and

(b) the Senate is currently conducting an inquiry, the completion date of which was recently extended to February 2016, into the impact of Australia's temporary work visa programs on the Australian labour market and on the temporary work visa holders;

(3) ensures that genuine labour market testing be applied to temporary work visas; and

(4) calls on the Government to ensure that the Department of Immigration and Border Protection has sufficient resources to properly ensure compliance with Australian visa conditions.

Five minutes does not give me time to do this motion justice, but I will certainly try to summarise the issues which I want to raise in the five minutes that I have. Currently, we have an unemployment rate of 6.2 per cent in Australia, or, in real numbers, some 780,000 Australians are unemployed. Over one-third of those are young people. At the same time, at any one time we have over 700,000 people in this country on some kind of visa which enables them to work within Australia. As at 31 March this year, there were 106,000 people on 457 skilled worker visas. As at 31 December last year, there were 160,000 working holiday visa entrants. As at 31 December last year, there were 300,000 student visa entrants in this country, and only two months before that the figure was 400,000. We have 60,000 illegal migrants in this country at any one time, and then we also have the seasonal workers who come and go at various times of the year. Indeed, there are one million-plus people in this country on some kind of visa about whom we do not have a clear understanding as to whether they are also taking up jobs in one way or another.

The matters that I raise bring me to several concerns that I have about the visa program in this country. It is clear that Australian jobs are being taken up by overseas workers. In particular, young people in this country are missing out because those jobs are quite often going to other young people who are coming into the country on either working holiday visas or student visas. In turn, young people in Australia are missing out on the job experience that they would otherwise get and perhaps the doorway to a career further down the track. What is also clear to me is that parents of those young people are incredibly frustrated and, indeed, anxious at the fact that their children cannot get jobs whilst overseas entrants are filling those jobs. Only on Saturday, I had a parent speak to me at length about that very matter.

My second concern relates to the exploitation of labour by rackets that are occurring in this country. We saw recently the exposure of the 7-Eleven stores debacle, where people were clearly being underpaid and overworked by an organisation that was deliberately distorting and abusing the visa system in this country. That particular matter has a long way to go and I am sure that we will hear much more about it in the future, but what is clear to me is that, at the moment, because of the visa laws in this country, there are opportunities for people, whether they are agents or employers, to exploit overseas workers and employ them ahead of Australians. Indeed, it is alleged that one out of every five 457 visa holders is not even doing the job that they were brought in for or that they are not being paid correctly.

The other matter that I am very concerned with is that this whole issue of bringing in foreign labour is leading to the driving down of Australian wages and conditions. Australians living in this country have to live in Australia and pay for Australian costs of living. They have mortgages to pay and they have families to support, and they will be forced, if it means saving their job, to accept lower standards of wages and conditions in order to continue to be able to provide for their families. That is not the direction that we should be taking in this country.

We also have illegal stayers here, some 60,000 of them. We do not know what they are doing, but I suspect most of them are employed somewhere, cash in hand, doing some work that could otherwise be done by an Australian. But, again, we do not seem to do much about that—and perhaps it is because the Department of Immigration and Border Protection is not well enough resourced to manage that issue. Then we have a government that is prepared to add to that pressure by creating free trade agreements that allow foreign workers to come in, by giving an additional 5,000 places to young Chinese to come in and work for 12 months, by changing shipping legislation to outsource work to foreign workers and by awarding contracts to overseas companies.

I know what the coalition members will say—that the figures were much higher when Labor was in office. The truth is: Labor acknowledged that and brought in labour market testing, and we also started to clamp down on some of the rorts that we saw happening at the time, not to mention that the economy was much stronger when Labor were in office than it is right now.

The concerns I raise are serious and they are something that the government should be addressing. The coalition should stop allowing the visa system in Australia to be exploited and used to fill Australian jobs with overseas labour when there are Australians who could otherwise do the work.

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