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

We are obviously going to have to keep going over this. But, to be fair to the minister, he's new to the portfolio. He got a hospital pass from the Minister for Home Affairs and he's still trying to figure it out. But we'll keep going over it and hopefully it will sink in. Because of your government's track record, we're concerned that you don't mean this about labour market testing. Why would that be the case, I wonder. Well, when Labor was in government in July 2013 we legislated for proper rules for labour market testing. The government changed, and what happened? They watered down those rules. At every turn you voted against proper labour market testing, which is to require Australians to be given a fair crack at a job before you offer it to a migrant worker. It's not a difficult proposition.

In response, this bill removes all of the protections currently there to require labour market testing. So, if we pass this bill, it removes all the safeguards in the legislation. And you say, 'Don't worry; we're going to have an instrument—and it's going to be a great instrument!' We don't know whether it's a big, fat, robust instrument that will have all the matters covered off', will do the job and fix the problem. We don't know that. It might be a skinny little instrument with just one or two requirements which mean nothing in the real world. We just don't know.

Mr Neumann interjecting—

Even worse, as I heard the shadow minister say, it's not disallowable. So, if we don't want this instrument and the parliament sees it and goes: 'We don't want this thing; it doesn't do the job,' we can't even disallow it, which is the normal practice when tabling delegated legislation and putting it before the parliament. Of course, that's not a new thing.

The other reason we don't trust you, Minister—this is important even though it's not your portfolio—goes to your government's track record and your government's habit of exempting labour market testing in all of your trade agreements. We have myriad examples of this. We raised concerns about it. We eventually backed it, but we raised concerns about the way that labour market testing provisions were written into the China-Australia Free Trade Agreement. The recently updated Singapore free trade agreement provided further labour market testing exemptions, so that companies can just bring in services workers willy-nilly instead of testing the local market. We've raised the same concerns about the next version of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the TPP—or TPPPP, or whatever it's called at the moment—where, again, you're proposing to exempt labour market testing and not require companies to offer jobs to Australian workers first. So it's not surprising that we stand here trying to speak slowly and make the point to the government that there's a big say/do gap. We don't trust that your instrument, when it's finally revealed and put on the table, will do the job to protect Australian workers.

It is important to say that our concern for this is genuine. It is not driven by a xenophobic anti-migrant sentiment. You're not going to find people on this side of the House running the line of your dear friend Senator Hanson and saying, 'We should stop all migration,' or saying, as the member for Warringah would say, 'We should just cut migration'—because, QED, that will somehow fix the economy and improve the opportunities for Australians to get jobs. The truth is that a well-targeted migration program is good for the economy. If we bring in the right skilled workers who add value to a business, the evidence out there is clear that it helps grow local jobs and creates more opportunities for Australians.

Indeed, I was pleased to see that the government acknowledged this in a report recently tabled on migrant settlement outcomes, where it made it clear that there are positive economic outcomes from well-targeted migration programs. However, we also know through evidence, but also from being in our electorates—I picked this up doorknocking numerous times around the suburbs of Dandenong and Glen Waverley—that IT workers cannot secure work in Australian IT companies because they apply, or they don't apply, and they're usurped by sponsored workers from overseas who undercut them on wages and conditions and, of course, as we know, they are vulnerable to exploitation. So these are not anti-migrant amendments; they're sensible safeguards to provide at least the minimum level of assurance that your instrument, when it's revealed, is not going to be some skinny little thing that doesn't do the job but it's going to be robust and to protect Australian workers.

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