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

Overall, I commend the report. It's not 100 per cent perhaps what any of us would have written, but I think it's a good example of bipartisanship. We worked through it together, and it was broadly agreed across the committee and has a series of, if implemented, sensible recommendations. It is perhaps a peculiar report if you pick it up thinking you're going to read about the Working Holiday Maker program, which of course is a pre-eminent cultural exchange program for the nation, because predominantly the report talks about regional labour shortages. So the colloquially named 'backpacker visas' and the recommendations go all to pretty much how we could plug the agricultural and regional labour shortages.

It's not widely understood, I think, in the Australian community—certainly amongst many people in the city—just how dependent a lot of agriculture in regional Australia, and other industries indeed, have become dependent on temporary migrant labour. This visa is one of many important visas. About 84 per cent of working holiday-makers now in Australia actually work. They don't have to. I know a lot of Australian kids go overseas on similar equivalent visas, because these are reciprocal exchanges in many cases, and don't work. They go for holidays and backpacking and tourism. But 84 per cent of people in Australia on working holiday-makers work in some form, and indeed, since I think 2005 and 2016, when changes were made in both years, there are now significant incentives on people on working holiday-makers to stay for longer and go and do regional work for a period of time. So these industries have become increasingly reliant on working holiday-makers and temporary migrants to do this kind of labour.

The inquiry heard significant and very serious evidence about the growing labour shortage in these industries, and it's not something we can ignore. Between March and June this year, the number of working holiday-makers in Australia fell from 140,000 to 70,000. In just three months, we saw 70,000 backpackers—colloquially called—leave the country without the corresponding flow coming in. The National Farmers Federation said, 'industry will be confronted with a labour crisis, the likes of which it has never seen before.' The regional labour shortage is serious, growing and urgent. Hence, the interim report quite reasonably focuses on this issue.

There is no single solution. I think of it like a jigsaw puzzle, and it's not our job as a committee, as other speakers have said, to put together some kind of answer. Migration is not the sole answer. It's not our job in the migration committee to give the government a plan or a proposal to deal with this crisis. But there are some pieces of the jigsaw which I think we can offer.

I'll just put on the record: there are many reasons why it is hard to get Australians to do this work. It's hard work. It's physically hard work. It's often isolated from the population centres. It's low pay. It's not great pay given the sort of manual labour involved and the hours involved. And the sector, unfortunately, as we've seen over many years, is rife with exploitation. Now, I say that trying to be balanced. There are many employers trying to do the right thing. There are many farmers trying to do the right thing. But everyone knows that this sector—agricultural labour in particular, and some of the dodgy labour hire companies that proliferate finding workers for this sector—exploit people, and it's got that reputation. But also, of course, it's seasonal. There are peaks and troughs, so it's always going to be inherently difficult to get solely Australian workers to come and go at the right time. So there's a natural fit with temporary migrants, who do come and go from the country and often look for short-term work.

I think the solutions, as has been touched on by previous speakers, fall into a few different categories. There are solutions which you might call domestic. In that regard, the gap year, the idea of saying to students finishing year 12 or students finishing university, who might have been looking at doing a gap year overseas, or entering employment in the case of people finishing TAFE or uni, who are looking at the employment market or looking at their inability to travel—it makes perfect sense that we'd say to those young people, 'Hey, have you thought about having a gap year in Australia, or at least a gap six months? Take some time, see another bit of the country and help out with what is a serious national labour shortage, and you get paid to do it.' That is a good option. It's not going to see tens of thousands of young Australians, I believe, flooding to do this work, but with the right promotion and the right effort from the government and the right incentives, it may fill part of the gap and be part of the solution.

In that regard, I see that the government has announced some incentives around HECS and Newstart and so on. Their previous efforts regarding incentivising people on Newstart have failed. They've failed because they simply didn't recognise the economic reality that an extra two or three grand is simply impossible for someone trying to survive on Newstart to pay their rent in the city—often they're in the city—to keep paying their bills in the city and nick off to the country for two or three months and try and pay for accommodation there. It just doesn't add up. So the recommendations we made as a committee were more open ended, trying to recognise that the government's previous efforts have just failed. They weren't well designed. The government has responded, and time will tell whether those domestic incentives actually work or not.

There's then a series of recommendations, which the member for Solomon and others have touched on, around incentivising working holiday-makers who are here to stay longer and continue working. That's a good thing. They're already in the country. We don't have the quarantining border issues, predominantly. There's a bit of stuff about moving between states, but if we can incentivise them to stay and do more work in the sectors where we need them, that's a good thing.

Then there's a series of very interesting recommendations which effectively look at what you might call other temporary migrants. We had a range of evidence from various sector or industry stakeholders, as well as the Migration Institute of Australia, who quite reasonably pointed out that there's a range of temporary migrants already in the country who we could be drawing on. Of course I should also have acknowledged the role that the Seasonal Worker Program and our Pacific Island friends have played, which the member for Solomon touched on.

I want to make a couple of remarks about these other temporary migrants. I think the recommendations are quite thoughtfully crafted. We've suggested, for example, that we could look at incentivising international students who graduate, many of whom want to stay in Australia on the 485 visa, not all but some of whom are pursuing or seeking a pathway to permanent residency. Frankly, they're scared at the moment, when they look at the graduate employment market, thinking, 'I'm chasing my dream of contributing to this country; I've paid a fortune for my education, a high-quality education; and I don't see the possibility of getting the professional employment that I need in the next year or so in a graduate field. What am I going to do?' This would be a great option, at least to provide them with an option where they could do some regional work, then hopefully come back on that 485 visa for a longer period and still pursue the pathway they were seeking. That's quite sensible.

There was what I would call a nutty suggestion from labour hire firms saying that we should let all international students go bush now and they can just study online. I'm glad we didn't recommend that. I think that would open up the most enormous rort you can imagine, if we said to all international students, 'Go off and try and do your studies from a shearing shed while you're picking fruit.' It might be convenient from a labour point of view, but it fundamentally undermines the international education sector and what we should be on about in this country. If you come to this country to study—the pandemic aside—you should be studying as much as possible in classrooms. Otherwise, why are you here? We're just selling a work visa, and that's not something we should tolerate.

In closing, there were also some suggestions around other temporary visas. There was a sensible suggestion around the temporary skilled visa. Generally, if you're on a temporary skilled visa you're restricted to work for the same employer, but the suggestion is that we could relax the conditions to allow people who've lost their jobs because of the Morrison recession, the pandemic, whatever you want to call it, allow them to work for another employer. That makes sense.

There are a couple of things that we haven't got in here at the moment. We should have a bit more about the exploitation and the Fair Work Ombudsman, but perhaps we can address that in the final report. There's one thing in here which was touched on in the evidence but which is not in the recommendations, but I do think there's an opportunity. That is to help farmers by incentivising a certain cohort of refugees to do this work.

We still have in this country 3½ thousand people, who arrived and were found to be genuine refugees, who are existing on SHEV visas, the safe haven enterprise visa. They were sold a pup, basically, in 2014 by the now Prime Minister. They were told: 'If you go to regional areas on this SHEV visa, then you will have a pathway to permanency.' Well, 3½ thousand of them did that, and not one of them—in six years, not one of them—has got a permanent visa. We've also got 14,000 people who arrived by boat—over 10 years ago in some cases, but certainly over seven or eight years ago—who are on temporary protection visas. These are people who've been found to be genuine refugees who exist as a permanent underclass in this country. I have thousands of these people in my electorate. After the suggestion that the Refugee Council of Australia made, when it said: 'What if we let some of these people go and do this work in return for a permanent visa?', I've been contacted by numerous people saying: 'Where do I sign? I will go tomorrow. I simply want to be able to secure my future in this country. I've been here for 10 years—at what point will the government let me be Australian?' And I think that's a sub-optimal position. These people have been here for 10 years: I believe they should just get a permanent visa. But it's not a bad suggestion—it's a pragmatic suggestion—that would help at least some of them. In that regard, I hope that in the final report, whenever it's released, we see some progress and some recommendations on this.

I want to commend the member for Bennelong and the member for Nicholls, a Liberal Party member and National Party member, for publicly—in the committee hearing and out in the media—saying this is something we should look at, or, indeed, calling for it. And I know privately, from conversations with other National Party members of parliament, that there's also growing support for this. I hope that we can find a bipartisan solution to this problem.

Federation Chamber adjourned at 18:17

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