Laurie Ferguson (Werriwa, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

We will just start with a bit of history. The member for Hughes quoted some fine words from former conservative Prime Minister Stanley Bruce, which he read the other week. I would remind that member, when we are trying to picture this side of politics as racist and xenophobic, that Prime Minister Bruce tried to expel some people from this country on the basis of their ethnicity and their nationality. They were not Muslims; they were not Mexicans; they were New Zealanders, and one of them, Heffron, was to become a Premier of New South Wales. So that is a bit of history for the member for Hughes.

The previous speaker thought he was making a big concession in saying that there were some instances of abuse. He reassured us that it was not the majority and that it was a small problem. But in the real world we note that Monash University recently did a survey of foreign language newspaper advertisements in this country—not in Vienna, not in Berlin, but in Australia—and it found that 80 per cent of those advertisements for employees in foreign language papers in this country had wage offers below the legal limit. Similarly, The Sydney Morning Herald on 1 October did a survey of the Mandarin press in this country and found rates of $10 to $13, well below the minimum rate of $17.29. It also noted the real world, daily practice of intimidation of these workers and the threat of their visas being cancelled if they did not agree to hours and hours of overtime and low levels of wages. The website yeeyi.com, which essentially aims at Australian Chinese visitors, people who are on either student visas or temporary work visas, noted that wages as low as $4 an hour were being offered.

These people say this is no threat to Australian workers, we should not worry, there is no problem. There might be a few philanthropists out there, but there would be far more employers in this country who would be willing to take somebody for $4 an hour than pay the Australian legal minimum wage. The situation is that we have an unemployment rate of 6.2 per cent. The previous speaker talks about how many new jobs they have created. They do not talk about the mass losses of jobs in this country nor do they talk about the growth of the overall labour force and the fact that unemployment is now 6.2 per cent and that over eight per cent of Australians when surveyed said, 'Yes, I do get 20 hours a week. Yes, I do get eight hours a week work. But I'd rather work longer.' Roughly 14 per cent of the workforce are either unemployed or underemployed—and they say we have got to do this for the grape growers and the orange growers around the country.

The previous speaker on this side politics articulated the reality. We have seen it with Australia Post, a once-respected national government employer. We have seen it with Baiada Poultry. It has been witnessed in the large sectors of mass factory employment. It still exists in this country under this government. That is where it is happening. A few people in remote agricultural areas is not where it is needed. Of course, 7-Eleven was the most recent case. A multimillionaire has established his wealth through a business plan which requires his franchisees to then exploit their workers. There is no way the franchisees can avoid this. They get the students in, they know the students are only allowed to work 20 hours a week or in holiday periods, they have them working far more hours than that and then, after exploiting them, they threaten them and demand more hours of work out of them for the same rate of pay and then they say, 'If you say boo about this we'll go to the immigration department and get you kicked out of the country.' What temporary workers are going to be able to resist that kind of threat? That is what we are talking about.

The previous speaker says, 'Yes, there's an occasional instance of this. We've heard about it.' He and the member for Herbert from the Liberal National Party should go on a trip with the member for Hinkler, who is from their own part of Australia and from their own political party. He has had the guts to go on national TV and expose this kind of extortion: the attempt to sexually exploit women and the underpayment of people in their parts of this country. He is on their side of politics. He has been on national TV on two occasions.

We have a situation where there are now 160,000 primary temporary work (skilled) visas in this country, 160,000 working holiday workers. The other problem we have got here is that that is a large number of people. When they talk about policing it and doing something about it, the reality is that they are not interested in doing anything about it because they actually believe in this. They believe it is a way to discipline the workforce, to reduce Australian workers' wages. They are not interested in having a worthwhile, sizeable unit inside the immigration department to do anything about this. They are too interested in defending the undermining of Australian conditions because they have got some idea that will progress if we do that.

See this speech in context