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

I am pleased to follow the member for Moreton in this debate. This legislation, the Migration Amendment (Charging for a Migration Outcome) Bill 2015, touches on a matter that I referred to in a motion I had before the House just a month ago.

This legislation addresses one particular concern I had at the time and which I still have—that is, the issue of payments for visas; people were paying people here in Australia a fee in order to sponsor them to come over on a 457 visa. My view is that the legislation does not go far enough and should go much further. Indeed, that is what Labor's amendments do. The member for Moreton has just referred to all of those changes that Labor is proposing—all of which address other matters which have been identified as being problems in the current visa system we have in Australia, and all of these are matters which need to be addressed at some point in time.

I will just go through what those six or seven matters are: firstly, applying the same provision to all visas and not just 457 visas—that includes working holidays and student visas—and if time permits I will come back and explain why I believe all of this is necessary; secondly, protecting workers who have been coerced into doing the wrong thing; thirdly, increasing the financial penalties proposed under this legislation; fourthly, preventing student and working holiday visa holders from obtaining an Australian business number; fifthly, protecting whistleblowers, as we should do; and the sixth point is that the minister should be required to provide an annual report with respect to the progress of this legislation. It seems to me that if the minister does not accept all of these amendments the report is largely diminished. The last point is that of allowing unions to bring civil penalties against employers who also abuse the system.

It is increasingly evident that the visa system we have in Australia is being rorted. It is not only a result of what we have seen in the media and stories that have been followed through and investigated by different journalists. If you get out and about in the community, as I do, and speak to employers, or if you get in amongst the communities out there themselves, different ethnic groups that have come to this country, you soon work out and you soon understand what is effectively going on.

My concern is that this legislation is only being introduced by the government in response to the public backlash with respect to rorting. It is well and truly understood out there in the community but it has to date been allowed to fester. The government would not have brought this legislation to the House were it not for the exposes that have been provided by the different media personalities and investigators. My view is that it is only being done because it is a way for the government to divert attention to what is a very serious issue in this country.

Indeed, as I have said on other occasions, it probably suits the government agenda to push down wages by allowing overseas workers into Australia, because those workers, as we know, are more likely to work for lower wages. I suspect that this legislation is being brought into the House as a last resort. As a result of the exploitation of workers in this country and as a result of the rorting of the migration system and the different visas, wages have been pushed down across a whole range of sectors. That means that the nearly 800,000 Australians who are looking for work are put in a position where they are more likely to accept lower wages as well in order to get a job.

Indeed, I have spoken to families who tell me that members of their families simply cannot get a job. In one particular case, it was a young person who would have been prepared to work in a 7-Eleven, a cafe, a restaurant, a hotel or a retail outlet where the jobs were being taken by visa holders. Yet these people were missing out.

I assume the only reason the jobs were being offered to the visa holders is that they were being paid at a lower rate of pay, because otherwise I can see no good reason why that would have been the case.

The real test of the government with respect to this legislation is whether it will effect the amendments that Labor has put up, because those amendments broaden the scope of what we should be doing. We currently—when I say currently, I mean these are the last figures I was able to get—have in Australia about 106,000 457 visa holders, about 160,000 working holiday visa holders and at any given time between 300,000 and 400,000 student visas and another 60,000 or thereabout illegal stayers. I do not believe for a moment that all of those visa holders are here and legitimately complying with their visa conditions. Indeed, it is my view that many of them—even those that are not here on working holiday visas, student visas or 457s and so do not have an entitlement to work—are also working in Australian industries. Perhaps they are being paid cash in hand, but they are working and taking jobs that could otherwise be done by Australians looking for work.

A few years ago I was briefed about one of the scams going on in Adelaide. It was to do with taxi drivers coming in from another country. They were in most cases students who were supposedly here on student visas employed by the taxi owners at very low wages, housed in cramped accommodation with many people to a house and paid a very low rate. They were prepared to do that job because whatever difficulties and whatever hardship they endured here was still better than what they were enduring back in their home country and it meant that they could still perhaps save a few dollars and send them back home, which is what they were doing. But the truth of the matter is that they were being exploited and they were only being exploited because a member of their own community, perhaps—and I say perhaps because I have no evidence of this—in cohort with different migration agents, was bringing them over here and then employing them to drive the taxis around Adelaide. My understanding as a result of the briefing I had at the time is that a lot of that has been stopped because of some action has been taken.

In a similar way, I have spoken to and been on horticultural farms where fruit pickers and horticultural workers are bussed into the property by an agent who in turn collects the full rate of hourly pay for them but then keeps most of it after deducting things like accommodation expenses, transport expenses, agents' commissions and so on. Again, the workers get very little, but what little they get is still more than they would have made if they had stayed back in their own country, and so they are in no position to complain, because they were at least able to send some money back home.

What is even worse is that I have been told stories of visa overstayers working cash in hand or, even worse, working for an agent who, at the time they were meant to be paid, instead of paying them rings up the authorities and says there is a group of illegal workers working on that particular farm. The authorities come in, arrest them, put them in detention centres and deport them, so the person who was meant to pay them does not pay them and keeps all of the money instead of just some of it. That is the kind of exploitation that has been going on with unscrupulous agents over the years.

Much of this is very difficult to prove at any one time, because no-one is about to go in and make statements. No-one is about to dob in fellow workers and so on. So it goes on, but the truth of the matter is that it also goes on because the department is probably underresourced and does not have the ability to go out there and do the inspections and monitoring that ought to take place.

If this legislation is going to have any effect, the first thing that needs to be done is to ensure that the department is properly resourced. If it is not then the truth of the matter is that we might have legislation in place and there might be the occasional time when some action is taken but generally speaking it will fail because it simply is not going to be monitored adequately.

I come to the last point, which really goes to the heart of this legislation. I have also been told by an employer that they were a substantial cash incentive just to offer an overseas worker a 457 visa contract. They did not have to do anything but offer that person a contract, and they would have been given a substantial amount of money. This was an ethical employer who was not prepared to do that and so it did not happen, but I suspect that the person who was trying to get into this country ultimately found someone else who would have been prepared to do it. So it does go on. I certainly support the intent of this legislation to, hopefully, stop that kind of practice from happening or at the very least, if it does happen, have severe penalties imposed as a result of it.

The penalties are one of the matters that Labor would like to see amended. We believe that the penalties do not go far enough. Given the amount of money that is sometimes involved in these scams—and I am talking about substantial amounts of money being paid to agents in order to get people into the country in the first place and also about the commissions and so on that I referred to earlier that are deducted from those payments—there are substantial amounts of money to be made by the scammers. Again I concur with Labor's position on this that perhaps the penalties need to be increased even further.

The last point I want to make is that it is rare that we ever hear from employers who in turn notify the authorities about the kinds of scams that are going on. I do not for a moment believe that an employer who is employing people who are in turn being rorted is not aware of what is going on. You would have to be pretty naive. I have been on horticultural properties and in factories and I have seen what goes on. And I think if I was an employer here, I would know exactly what was going on and how the people may or may not be being exploited, not by the employer but by the agents who are bringing those employees in. Yet the employers have very little incentive to do anything about it because chances are that the employers, to some extent, are also taking advantage of the employees—perhaps they pay them a little less or perhaps they work them longer hours and under worse conditions—knowing that these employees, who, in most cases, come from impoverished countries, have very few English skills and are not likely to cause problems or complain about the employer. That is why the suggestion by Labor that the unions ought to have a role in this, in the civil proceedings, is a fair one and one that I think could make a difference. The unions may have some understanding of what is happening in their industry and therefore may be in a position to expose rorting and abuse wherever it is occurring. For that reason, it is not only a reasonable suggestion but it would also, quite frankly, enable the government to ensure that the administration of its own policy is sound because it will have another set of people overseeing the immigration system and the process in this country.

I do not have time to talk about the seven amendments in detail as I would like to but it seems to me that if we are going to address the issues that we all know are out there—indeed, even the Joint Standing Committee on Migration, which is currently inquiring into the seasonal worker program in this country, is starting to get evidence that I think supports most of what I said—then let us do it comprehensively. The suggestions put forward by Labor make sense. They are based on factual findings and, in my view, would demonstrate the government's genuine commitment to fixing this problem.

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