Julian Hill (Bruce, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I have four minutes in continuation, so I might just recap where I got to in that brilliant one-minute speech, just in case those listening at home have forgotten. The proposition which sits behind the amendments is simple: if there's an Australian who can do the job, they should get the job, and you should only be able to access the temporary skilled migration system if there's no suitable Australian who can do the job. That shouldn't be radical, but what the government is saying in its legislation as put forward is: 'Trust us. If you pass this bill, then we'll introduce an instrument.' As we've said to the minister, 'Show us your instrument. If you want us to believe that you're going to have proper rules for proper labour market testing then get out your instrument and put it on the table.' We don't know what it's like, we don't know what's in it and we don't know what the rules are. Right now, there is nothing in this bill to prevent the minister from writing some rules that say, 'It's okay to have an ad on Facebook for five minutes between midnight and 1 am targeted at Mildura.' That's not proper labour testing, but it's not ruled out in this bill.

The shadow minister's amendments are moderate, reasoned and not over the top, just like the shadow minister. They provide for sensible, minimum requirements for advertising—things like:

The period—

of advertising—

must not start earlier than 4 months before the nomination is received by the Minister.

That means that the employer can't just say: 'About five years ago, I advertised for a job like that. We didn't get anyone. Five years on, it's probably still the same. I'll just get a temporary migrant. Why not accept that?' Why not show us the instrument and say, 'This is what we propose.' Then we can have a debate and say: 'Okay, that sounds all right. Maybe it's reasonable.'

A requirement in amendment (2) is:

The Minister must not make a determination ... unless the Minister is reasonably satisfied that any advertising of the position undertaken in the determined manner:

... that a significant proportion of suitably qualified and experienced Australian citizens or Australian permanent residents would be likely to be informed about the position ...

I go back to the example of putting a dodgy ad in the paper for a week in an obscure regional newspaper and saying that it satisfies labour market testing. Clearly, if you at least put this in as a sensible threshold minimum, you'd be forced, under the amendment, to ensure that Australian citizens and permanent residents are likely to be informed about the position.

Secondly—and this is important; we've seen examples of it—amendment (2) says that job ads 'set out any skills or experience requirements that are appropriate to the position'. I've spoken before on examples in the shipping industry, in relation to 400 visas. The shadow minister and I looked through folders of evidence in relation to this. Minister Dutton has received numerous letters, which have never received adequate responses, that jobs are being advertised in the shipping industry requiring levels of skill far above what is actually needed to do the job. Magically, they could say, 'We didn't find anyone, so we'll get some temporary migrants whom we can pay a bit less.' They're vulnerable to exploitation and it locks out Australian workers. Importantly, the shadow minister's amendment provides that jobs must be advertised for a period of at least four weeks. If you're going to go to all the trouble of using the skilled migration system to sponsor a temporary migrant, it doesn't sound unreasonable to me that you'd be required to advertise the job for, at a minimum, four weeks.

These rules as proposed in the amendments are not fully prescriptive; they set a few basic minimum standards.

See this speech in context