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

A recent ABC report in the aftermath of the collapse of a Queensland enterprise gave a chilling indication of the agenda of the Turnbull government as to the Australian workforce. They spoke of the impact upon a nearby factory, on 200 workers who would lose their jobs because of the collapse of this enterprise. They did not speak about Australian workers of Lebanese, Sierra Leonean or German extraction; they spoke of the impact upon 200-odd Taiwanese workers, because the local factory affected clearly only employed Taiwanese workers. And that is the reality of which we speak today.

You would think, from hearing the previous speaker, that she had never ever had a discussion with the member for Hinkler on her own side who, unlike her, understands what is going on in the Australian workforce. It is all right for her to say that this is a 'minimal' problem et cetera. She is obviously in line with the previous minister for immigration, Mr Morrison, who, in the document Robust new foundations, spoke of the need to fast-track employers' rights to bring foreign workers into the country. He spoke of the way we could facilitate approvals. He spoke of the need to have easier English requirements for people. He also moved in relation to the 10 per cent reduction in the $53,900 maximum income threshold. In that release, he gave very cursory, minimal attention to reports by the Ombudsman in regard to the already existing problems.

When daily reports in our media and from the trade union movement, and from people like the member for Bendigo, exposed what was happening—the very drastic levels of underpayment and exploitation in this country—James Massola could report in The Sydney Morning Herald on 15 October 2015 that the employment minister, Michaelia Cash, was going to 'urgently' do something about the government's problem. She was going to put together a 'ministerial working group'. We have heard that the Minister for Justice, who is one of these high-powered intellectual giants on the committee, does not even know about its meetings. We have a situation where they were going to investigate illegal practices, and, it is interesting to note, had a 'very firm commitment' as to this very serious problem—they were going to make sure they did nothing until after the next elections.

Some time before that, the Monash University Centre for Population and Urban Research in August 2014 spoke of 417 workers 'along with students and other temporary visa holders … proving to be ferocious competitors for the same entry-level jobs that Australian resident youth are seeking'. Despite that very strong acknowledgement from Australian academia and in our media, this government says, 'We'll have a high-powered working group into this, and, after the next election, we might do something about this.'

Already, in June 2014, there were 711,240 temporary workers with work rights in this country. The level of complaints from them about the way they were treated by employers was three times the rate amongst the rest of the Australian workforce. The Fair Work Ombudsman—a government authority—as of the announcement in October 2015 by Minister Cash, could already indicate that they had had 6,000 requests for assistance by employees, and that $4 million had already been collected on their behalf.

So, whether it is the reports on 7-Eleven—the most notorious instance—or of a Darwin company paying backpackers $5 an hour, or of a blueberry business in northern New South Wales being ordered to pay back $46,000 in unpaid wages to nearly 140 seasonal workers, this is rampant. This—unlike the previous speaker's analysis—is not a minor, occasional, often accidental outcome. We are seeing a clear strategy by the Turnbull government, and its predecessor the Abbott regime, to make sure that the Australian workforce is undermined by a large number of imported temporary workers—whether they be students, 417 visa holders or backpackers. It all adds up to one reality: they are here to minimise the ability of workers to stand up for themselves. They are here to give employers the whip hand. They are here to make sure that the conditions of people in this country are driven down.

I will just remind the previous speaker: when she speaks about Labor earlier this century and what Labor did in the White Australia policy, maybe she could read the comments of Alfred Deakin with regard to why we should not have Japanese in this country.

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