Adam Bandt (Melbourne, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

and plastering, the member for Denison tells me. Don't say that we can't find people who can do that work here. You know why there is an incentive to bring those workers in? Because they didn't get paid for five or six weeks. The union again—in this instance the CFMMEU—got involved and has forced some of the back pay, but many of these workers are now being disappeared and sent back to China.

This is a pattern—pattern after pattern. We raised it in this House when the China-Australia Free Trade Agreement was being signed. We asked Labor to vote with us on some amendments then, and they said no. Labor has known about this for a very long time. You even acknowledge that these issues still exist, but you won't vote with us to stop them. You are enabling this neoliberal government. There is a reason this government is on the nose. It is because people in this country are sick of the trickledown troika of Labor, Liberal and big business. They are sick of three decades of being told that we have to sell everything off and have a race to the bottom. They are sick of being told that society has to be dog-eat-dog, where paying people the lowest-possible wages is the only ultimate goal of everything.

They want protection of the things that matter and they want people to be looked after here and for people to be looked after overseas as well. You can oppose these trade deals and argue that they should be better, not because you don't want people from overseas coming to this country but because you want a bare minimum in place that says that if someone comes to Australia to do work here then they should get paid the local minimum wages and conditions. It is not objectionable to argue that. And we now know, because we've seen it time after time after time, that these so-called free trade deals aren't actually just about free trade; they are about giving corporations greater rights than they already have and greater rights as against everyday people.

We have seen time after time examples of abuse. So, we need to stop it. We know that at the moment when you bring people in and there's no skills testing; you just put the right code on the form and the department grants it. We know that there's no rigorous labour market testing at the moment and, to the extent that there is, so many countries are now going to get an exemption as a result of this. And we know that it's fanciful to think that the countries that have that are suddenly going to give it up just because there happens to be a new Prime Minister. Why on earth would they do that? I hope they do, but I wouldn't be pinning my whole trade and labour policy on that basis. But that's what this Labor Party is doing.

We know that in many instances these visas are issued on the same day that they're requested, suggesting that there could be no independent testing of skills; it is just not happening. To the extent that there is any assessment, it's a paper based administrative assessment, and we don't even see in the TPP or in this legislation a simple statement that says that if someone comes to Australia to do the work then they should be paid local wages and conditions. You would think—

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