Damian Drum (Nicholls, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

It was a rushed process in getting the interim report presented to the parliament when we did. However, the evidence that we heard in this inquiry was stark. It was repeated time and time again. It was very, very clear. The evidence is that there are so many jobs out there and yet we are still held back by an old-fashioned system. In relation to the first recommendation that's been opposed by the Labor Party, talking about how we streamline market testing, right at the moment you can go online and check and see how many jobs there are available. You can see how many jobs there are for a qualified chef. It's over 5,000. You can see how many jobs there are for a restaurant manager. You can see it with your own eyes on one website. Yet when it comes to market testing, these electronic online forums are not counted, so the only way that market testing can work is if you physically go and pay for the very expensive process of advertising in a paper.

When anybody wants to work in the restaurant system or in the cafe system or the hospitality system, the first thing they do is go online and check and see what's available. They don't go through the papers. Yet here we are with these old-fashioned regulations saying that market testing doesn't work unless you use the old newspaper system. Bringing this aspect of looking for work into the 21st Century is something we should be very, very proud of. This is not, as the Labor Party would suggest, that we are trashing the system. I think it's very, very disappointing that they have taken this approach.

The evidence that we heard was stark. It wasn't made up. It was clear from every witness, witness after every witness, that there's a whole raft of jobs out there that Australians simply don't want to do. It starts off with the abattoirs—dirty work, tough, hard work—it starts off with horticulture work, which can be done in the heat—difficult work—but then it moves into the trades, into diesel mechanics, motor mechanics, a lot of what they call the wet trades. Then it moves into some of the more glamorous trades of carpentry and electrical work. So there's a whole raft of jobs out there that clearly cannot be filled and that Australians don't want to fill.

The Labor Party suggested that we put in place a whole range of incentives to make it easier for Australians to work in the horticultural sector. So we did that; but we warned them that the take-up would be minimal, and it was minimal. I believe the recommendations that we have put forward are very well balanced and reflect the evidence that we heard. This is what's disappointing when the Labor Party heard exactly the same evidence. They had exactly the same facts and figures presented to them. They have an issue and are simply unable to bend their policies, and therefore they have to come out with a dissenting report. The concept that, right now, there are 5,000 jobs available for the position of chef in Australia is stark and alarming. I certainly wouldn't try to make it easier, because I'm the very proud father of Gabrielle Drum, who's just finished a 12-month, full-time pastry chef course at William Angliss. I'm not going to bring out competition for my daughter! What we find when we look into the hospitality sector is that, if you can bring in a chef at the back of a restaurant or you can bring in a restaurant manager at the front of the restaurant, then they can bring with them about five Australian jobs in the hospitality sector for each of the cornerstone jobs that go with the restaurant industry.

A very real way to grow Australian jobs and Australian businesses is to use overseas workers when we cannot find Australian workers to fill the roles. We need to look at the abattoir industry, because the abattoir industry is so critical for our agricultural sector. Farmers are currently building up their stocks and their herds. In 15 to 18 months, there will be an incredibly more significant amount of cattle that will need to be processed and we simply won't have the workers to do that.

The committee heard that we need to urgently expand the list of jobs on the Priority Migration Skilled Occupation List. Something that we heard time and time again is that we need to do that. There were also incredible delays in place throughout the Department of Home Affairs. There seemed to be lack of transparency. Employers weren't able to ascertain the stage of their application. They didn't know where their applications were in the queue. As I said earlier, this not just about what we might call dirty, tough jobs—unattractive work. We've found that we have a whole range of other trades for which employers are really struggling to fill apprenticeships. We've put an enormous amount of incentives around looking after first-year apprentices, yet we are still struggling to fill the roles. Like the previous speaker, I'm looking forward to getting in touch with the TAFE colleges, the learning institutions, to find out why young Australians are not moving into some of the trades. I was very happy and very proud to became a qualified carpenter in my younger years. It gave me the greatest start I could have hoped for. It's such a fantastic opportunity for so many young Australians to take up the opportunity to be a qualified tradie.

One of the recommendations we put in place is that the federal government work much more cohesively with the states and their peak bodies to recruit additional people under the Seasonal Worker Program and also the Pacific Labour Scheme. What we have seen this year is one of the greatest failures of government policy I have witnessed in my nearly 20 years in parliament. We have farmers in the horticultural sector that have developed the best fruit and the best strains of their particular commodity. They have had a bumper crop. They beat the rains, the heat, the pests, the birds, the frost and the hail—they beat it all—and created an absolutely bumper crop, only to be let down by state governments that didn't want the workers to come and get the crops off. They didn't want to put in place the quarantine processes. The industry was ready to pay for all of this, but, certainly in Victoria, under the Labor government, they simply didn't have the will to help those people on the farms by bringing in the labour to get the crops off. There are losses running into the hundreds of millions of dollars, of fruit just sitting there rotting on the trees and then finally falling to the ground. It's absolutely heartbreaking to see these responses from a government that simply didn't want to get involved in the work it needed to do in that regard.

So we've still got plenty of work to do. We've still got a lot of work to do. We haven't mentioned in here the problem that we have with undocumented workers, but that sort of fits hand in glove with what we're doing with skilled migrants and bringing additional people into this country. We've already got a large portion of people here who are working within horticulture who are effectively undocumented and have zero status because they overstayed whatever visa it was that they turned up on.

So we've got plenty of work to do, but the first thing I think we need to do is bring this labour market testing into the modern era. Let's accept that the way Australians look for a job today is go online. The first thing they do is they go online and they check it out thoroughly. We need to acknowledge that, if there are jobs that are available online, then that should be market tested and the people that are working within the departments should have a much better understanding of how each particular sector sits in relation to the people available to take those jobs or not available to take those jobs. Therefore, they should know once and for all, on a continual basis, which jobs need to be market tested and which jobs do not.

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