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

It is a great pleasure to follow the member for Charlton. He is a passionate advocate of justice in this area, and it is justice that the Labor Party seeks—justice and a fair go not just for Australian workers but for workers all over the world. We believe in a wages system and an immigration system that protects Australian workers and protects guest workers who have come to work in this country under various visas, whether it be a 457 visa, a student visa or a backpacker's short stay visa. This is an important bill. It is important to say to the government that we welcome it. It is a good idea for them to make it unlawful that a sponsor be paid by visa applicants for a migration outcome and that there be a robust penalty behind that framework—that is an important thing.

The Senate Education and Employment References Committee on 19 June 2015 heard evidence from some nurses. I know, because when I was in the Health portfolio I took a particular interest in what happens in nursing—that is, we have thousands of nursing graduates every year who are unable to find work in Australian hospitals and unable to get their graduate position. They often move between states when they cannot find a position in their own state, but they are sometimes unable to get a job or a graduate position at all. There are up to 3,000 graduate nurses who cannot get a spot in Australian hospitals, but at the same time we have a number of nurses coming in under 457 arrangements. The Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation is not against 457 visas. The 457 visa holders often become members of the federation. They often end up becoming permanent residents or citizens of the country and are often the strongest unionists you can find. But there is this concern, of course, that when there are people graduating from university—having paid for their degrees and having had the public make a contribution as well through taxes and through the higher education system—we cannot match up those graduates with graduate positions in our hospitals. It is a very serious matter that we should all be concerned about, and it is very important to the health pipeline.

Interestingly enough, the Senate committee heard some evidence from Mrs Alferaz, who was a 457 visa holder. According to the Senate references committee Hansard, on page 16, she was charged a fee of 'between $2,000 and $3,000' that was 'simply monies that the employer sought for the privilege of supporting the 457 application.' It was a nursing agency that sought that money. There is quite a bit of evidence there, including from Mr Blake, who was giving evidence on her behalf. He said:

… in Mrs Alferaz's case, during her time of employment with the same aged care employer, she sought the employer's support for an application for permanent residency and was told, 'We will support you, but it will cost an additional $3,500.'

So we have a situation there where it is not just the 457 visa that is up for a fee, but also permanent residence of Australia. Nobody in this place would think that this was a fair state of affairs or a just state of affairs. She was, incidentally, also underpaid while she was here to the tune of $65,000, which is a concern in and of itself. This lady, Mrs Alferaz—I believe she was a nurse from the Philippines—came to our country to work, was underpaid, and then faced demands for money to get a visa and to get permanent residence.

This is clearly not what we would anticipate would go on with Australia's immigration system. This should be fundamental to our character as a nation. We regard ourselves as believing in a fair go; it is a very tightly held belief in our character. We believe that we are a fair country. And it is not just a matter of belief. Any Australian on the main street out there, in Gawler, in Sydney or in any part of this country would regard the idea that employers or sponsors or people in third countries should be profiting from our immigration system and our visa system as totally repugnant. It is absolutely a stain on our national character and it is a stain on our industrial relations system because here we are saying, 'We're a fair country. We believe in a minimum wage. We believe in award conditions.' Frequently we have politicians on both sides getting up in this place and talking about that, yet here we have a visitor to our country, a guest worker in our country—and that is what 457 visas holders are. They are guest workers. This is not a skilled migration program anymore. It has morphed into a guest worker program and that is what the backpacker visa is morphing into. It is morphing into a guest worker program where people are not here for holidays at all. They are not European backpackers here to do a bit of fruit picking but rather there are organised labour hire companies bringing people in from various countries and systematically using of them in labour hire. The same is happening with student visas as well.

These are very serious issues. I do not want to bore people with headlines but The Australian on 6 August said, 'Australia Post contractor arrested in alleged student visa scam'. There we have not just a very large Australian employer, Australia Post, but a government-owned entity which uses labour hire companies where the contractor was arrested for not only defrauding the Commonwealth but also for falsifying documents such as police checks and student records. So there is profiting not just at one end of the system, not just off the backs of the labour of students who are in this country, but profiting the other way, charging them for a course as well, in effect, turning our student visa program into a scam. That is just not acceptable.

The idea that major employers would be willing participants in this in that they do not have systems in place to prevent it is an absolute outrage. If major employers, including Commonwealth-owned entities think they can get away with saying, 'Oh well, we had an audit system. It was a subcontractor. They told us they were doing the right thing' and then dusting their hands off and away we go, if they think anybody is going to believe that or cop it, that may happen the first time around but not forever. I say to major employers in this country that you had better have your audit systems in placed and they had better be real audit systems to catch these situations because if they are revealed in the press and they are revealed to the parliament, you should not expect that there will not be a response.

Ben Schneiders and Royce Millar—I have not always agreed with these two reporters but they have done a good job revealing in the Sydney Morning Herald on 2 October 2015 under the headline 'Black jobs: rampant exploitation of foreign workers in Australia revealed', the ads that are now online all of which breached the minimum wage. What are student visa applicants, foreign backpackers and people on 457 visas supposed to think about Australia when they find that they are treated in this way, that we say up one thing and we do another, that they are brought here with the expectation that they are coming to a developed country with good laws and good outcomes for workers and they are treated in a manner that is not consistent with our laws?

On 23 June this year, ABC News, 'Asian workers told to lodge bogus refugee visas at Baiada poultry plant; workers afraid to speak out.' Again, here we have Malaysian workers at Baiada's poultry plant in Beresfield, near Newcastle, charged up to $3,500 by a labour hire agency to file an application for a protection visa. It is just extraordinary. I am glad the government is responding with this bill but these headlines demand a robust response.

I note in the case of Baiada and in the case of many of these employers they have made undertakings to the Fair Work Ombudsman and I think that is a good thing, but I say again: employers have to be aware that their corporate reputation is something to be valued and they do not want to be associated with the practices which I think we all would regard as completely abhorrent.

Labor's amendments are good amendments. The government is in this brand new spirit of policy discussion, listening and having a bit of a free for all on tax and a whole range of other areas. I am not sure whether they have any new policies in the Abbott-Turnbull, but we have good amendments which should be adopted, amendments that expand the scope of the provisions of this bill to all work-related visas, sponsored and non-sponsored and including working holiday and student visas. You only have to look at 7-Eleven and some of these other cases to know that, if you close the loop holes for 457 visas, the characters who are exploiting this visa classification, they will simply move to other visa categories and seek to profit from those. With all this regulation we are now learning, sadly in a whole range of areas, that you need to have things as tight as a drum.

Our second amendment relates to criminal offences and civil penalties. It is important to have criminal penalties in this, not just the cancellation of visa. We want to have increased maximum penalties in terms of imprisonment and in terms of fines and I think it is important to lift those to make it quite clear to all concerned that that will not happen. We want to make sure that workers on student visas and on working holiday visas do not get ABN numbers. That was a feature, I think, of the goings on at Australia Post—they were all on ABN numbers and were in theory contractors. It was certainly so in the case of Baiada poultry where people were defined as subcontractors.

In terms of our amendments, we want to protect whistleblowers. It does not seem sensible to put the visa holder in a position to seek redress under the industrial relations scheme but they then have to lose their visa. That places them at such a disadvantage; they would never present themselves to authorities in that situation. So we want to make sure that these guests in our country, these guest workers, are treated decently and that they are not the ones who pay the penalty; they should not be sent packing because of some of these employment relationships and scams that go on in this area.

We want to make sure there is a report by the minister to this parliament. I think this is terribly important. As the member for Charlton said, this whole area demands a bipartisan response, but certainly a response from the Labor Party. It is our intention to protect Australian workers and foreign workers, so it is important that we have that information.

Finally, we want proper investigation and compliance, and that includes civil penalty proceedings being able to be brought by unions in these cases. People opposite want to pummel unions, but often—and I know this to be the case in terms of the NUW in South Australia—they are the people who are blowing the whistle on many of these situations. They are often the people who are doing the good work exposing some of these rorts.

So it is important the government consider with haste our amendments. I suggest they adopt them all. I certainly hope that we find some agreement across the chamber and I commend the bill to the House.

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