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

I want to start at the outset with two clear, simple but powerful propositions. Firstly, Australia has done really well over decades as a permanent settler society. Secondly, as a corollary, we don't want our country to become a guest worker society where there's this temporary underclass that is exploited. I think most Australians would agree with me. Even if those opposite don't agree with those simple propositions, don't care about migrant workers being exploited or won't back action to do something about it, let's be very clear on the self-interest that every Australian has in stamping out the exploitation of migrant workers. Exploitation and wage theft don't just hurt migrant workers. They impact every Australian, as they can drive down wages and worsen conditions for all Australian workers. If unscrupulous employers can keep exploiting cheap migrant labour, there's no incentive to pay Australian workers properly or to raise wages.

This was an old-fashioned speech at the outset, but let's put a couple of facts on the table. The government, informed by evidence, has public policy informed by evidence—I know, particularly when you look at the climate change debates of recent years, that it's a shocking thing for the opposition. Fact: one in six recent migrants to Australia are paid less than the minimum wage—one in six! Recent migrants are 40 per cent more likely to be underpaid than long-term residents with the same skills and the same experience doing the same job. Temporary visa holders make up four per cent of the workforce yet make up 26 per cent of all litigation initiated for breaching the Fair Work Act, and there's every indication that that's a significant underrepresentation of the real situation.

Personally, I think those statistics alone are shocking and morally wrong. Everyone in our country should be treated fairly, whatever their visa status is, whether they're here for four weeks, four years or 40 years and whether they're citizens, permanent residents or temporary visa holders. But that's manifestly not the case now, and it's been going on for years. The previous government had numerous inquiries over their decade in office, but they failed to do anything meaningful. I'll quote Professor Allan Fels, Chair of the 2019 Migrant Workers' Taskforce, who said that this exploitation:

… has been severe problem for at least 10 years, there have been huge numbers of underpaid and exploited migrant workers and nothing was done about it. Now it is extremely timely …

He said that in June this year.

These are not abstract issues, though. They're real people. I see the member for Hotham here; we share a community in Greater Dandenong. In our communities, the majority of people are born overseas. They're not 'other people'. We have tens of thousands of people in each of our electorates in south-east Melbourne who are not citizens but here on temporary visas. They're our neighbours. They're the other parents at the school gate. They're the people who make your coffee. They're the people who clean your workplaces. They're the people who repair your cars. They're the people who pack the food in the factories for the supermarkets.

Enough is enough. We don't need more inquiries and more reports. We need action by changing the law, finally, and changing the incentives. That's what the government is doing. This bill is not every step of the plan, but it's an important part of the plan. For the first time in a long time the government is already out there raising awareness amongst employers about their obligations, actually getting out and visiting businesses. People may ask if will we step out all exploitation, and of course the answer is no. Some people will always do the wrong thing in any human society or any big service system in the economy. But we can and we must make real changes. The Liberals and the Greens political party should not play politics; they should actually vote for this bill.

One important shift is to move the focus of compliance from the worker to the employer. I can't emphasise that enough. For too long, workers who were exploited for being in breach of a visa condition were then punished through the criminal system rather than the employers who were breaking the law. This practical fact has led to the clause in the bill that repeals the part of the Migration Act that, currently, makes it a criminal penalty for workers to breach their visa conditions and so, effectively, to criminalise speaking up.

All of this goes to what kind of country we want to be. There's undoubtedly a crisis of exploitation in Australian workplaces. People are too terrified to speak out when they're mistreated because of the high risk that they'll be criminally charged. Exploitation is not isolated. It has been proven, year after year, in report after report, to be systemic in the labour market. Unscrupulous employers, migration agents and facilitators have misused the visa rules and the visa system to exploit workers.

I've talked about these issues over many years. It is hard for people—for most citizens, frankly—who were born in Australia, to truly understand the vulnerability, and the vulnerability to exploitation, that is caused by a temporary visa status and the power that an employer has over a person if they're on a temporary visa. That threat is a key driver of exploitation: do what I tell you, or I'll dob you in and get you deported. That's the basic power imbalance and basic threat. It's a key driver of sexual slavery, underpayments, wage theft, mistreatment conditions, empty promises of permanent residency and sham contracting—that threat of calling Australian Border Force and having them deported. There are stories where people have had their passports locked away and been sexually enslaved. These are not abstract. It's actually happening right now. As we debate this legislation, there'll be people right across the country hidden away in factories, on farms and in houses in the suburbs and the regions suffering this kind of exploitation. We have to reverse the onus.

This bill implements key recommendations from Professor Allan Fels's Migrant Workers Taskforce report in 2019. It recognises, as I said at the outset, that when people vulnerable to exploitation are mistreated we all suffer. It also inherently recognises the positive contribution made by so many workers and that Australia cannot take for granted that we're a destination of choice for prospective migrants. We're in the global competition for talent. This growing problem we have as a country, where it's reported around the world by international students and others that if you come to Australia you'll get exploited, is something we can't sustain. Morally, we can't sustain it in terms of the impact on Australians and their wages and prospects, and we can't sustain it in terms of our competitive position globally. So it's critically important for the government of Australia to demonstrate our strong commitment to addressing worker exploitation, because it's the right thing to do and it's squarely in our national interest.

The bill reflects our principle, if you like, that approaches to employment and migration have to work side-by-side, collaboratively, if we're actually going to address exploitation. The Fair Work Act and the Migration Act have to work together to protect workers, regardless of their visa status. ACTU president Michele O'Neil was spot on when she said:

Migrant worker exploitation is a national shame—we welcome the Albanese Government taking action to protect migrant workers from exploitation and to implement key recommendations of the Migrant Worker Taskforce—after years of inaction by the Coalition Government.

She's right: it is a national shame. And the former government is to blame—as I said, not for every incidence of exploitation; of course you can't stamp everything out: there'll be people who do the wrong thing. But they are to blame for having these reports and, worse than doing nothing, going through a political charade and pretending they were going to do something but instead sitting by and overseeing this crisis of exploitation in workplaces across the country. There was a national debate in the wake of that shocking 7-Eleven scandal, which showed it was a scam. It wasn't just missed time sheets. It was a systemic exploitation and rorting of the labour and migration systems to exploit vulnerable people, undercutting the wages of Australians, hurting our international reputation and just doing the wrong thing. They could have fixed this.

So, they got the Migrant Workers' Taskforce report in 2019—and fair enough. As the previous speaker said, to their credit, they responded. They didn't agree with everything, but they put out a government response and said, 'We're going to do this stuff.' They didn't do anything. It was a scam; it was a sham. Then they introduced legislation to the parliament, two years later. In 2021 they introduced a bill. But, as was so common with the former government, they didn't even bring the bill forward for debate. They introduced the bill, they got the press release, they got the speech up on social media—job done! They didn't actually care about stamping out migrant worker exploitation. It was all about sending another dodgy message before the election, to make people think they were doing something. They didn't even bring the bill on for debate, let alone allow a vote, let alone allow it to go to the Senate, let alone allow it to become law.

It'll be interesting to see whether the opposition can actually bring themselves to vote for action on this, given their wasted decade of division, dysfunction, decay and denial, which exacerbated this problem, as they sat by and watched it grow. As we saw, the Liberals preferred temporary visas to permanent visas, which actually made it easier for unscrupulous employers to exploit workers. Not only did they sit by and do nothing, not only did they pretend to do something—a con trick—but they actually made it easier for employers to exploit workers. They also created a backlog of nearly one million visa applications—well over a million if you count the citizenship backlog, too. They neglected the basic administrative tasks by looking the other way. Instead of employing some public servants, as the government's done—I think over 500 new public servants in the Department of Home Affairs, working through that shocking backlog—they blew 92 million bucks trying to privatise the visa system. I think the reason they abandoned it wasn't because they figured out it wasn't a great idea but because they couldn't find anyone to give it to, as a tenderer, who wasn't a mate of Scott Morrison, because good old Scott Briggs wasn't there. They had to abandon it because of probity. It's been in the paper. That $92 million included I think a $42 million PowerPoint for BCG. I mean, it's good work if you can get it, isn't it?

So, the bill's new criminal offences of using a person's migration status to exploit them in the workplace are welcome. That's recommendation 19 from the task force. They could have done that years ago. There's a new tool to prohibit employers who are engaged in exploitative practices from being able to hire workers on temporary visas for a period of time. That's recommendation 20 from the task force. They could have done that years ago. But the bill will go further. Higher penalties are proposed for people who do the wrong thing. There has to be a strong deterrent. As the government has made clear, we've got to reverse that onus, we've got to change the incentive and we've got to remove the disincentive for people to speak up about exploitation. It's a ridiculous situation that we've put up with for too many years, where an exploited worker makes a report and then they're threatened or criminally prosecuted, and the employer gets off scot-free.

The government will promote workers' ability to speak up and report exploitation by putting in place appropriate protections from visa cancellation, and that's just one part of the government's plan to protect workers. In the budget this year there was $50 million over four years to Australian Border Force. Shocking revelations—I do not envy the Minister for Home Affairs the job that you have to do now to clean up this mess, after it was revealed that there was almost no enforcement on shore, almost no integrity measures. I see the former assistant minister sitting over there. We've got the Leader of the Opposition. He set up the shemozzle—set it up to fail, as the leaked report said. He was a tough cop on the beat, tough on the borders. It turns out that over 100,000 people arrived on their watch, with fake protection claims that they let run up, with no onshore enforcement and no integrity measures.

An opposition member interj ecting—

No integrity measures. They know it's true. It's a shocking record.

The other problem about letting the million visas back up, as any of the migration professionals will tell you, is that you create a honey pot. It is better to work migration scams then because the department, the Administrative Appeals Tribunal—the whole system—is so clogged and so overwhelmed with years of backlogs that it's a good return on investment to run a scam. They can come here, make fake claims, hang around for years working and sending money home, and eventually, if they happen to get deported, if one of the department's couple of staff find them, then they've made a lot of money. It's a good return on investment.

As I said, the ABF with those new resources oversaw a month of action in July targeting those employers who were suspected of doing the wrong thing. It wouldn't have been possible without the additional funding provided by the government and the priority that this government is placing on tackling the exploitation of workers.

In summary, I commend the bill to the House. I do genuinely hope that the opposition can bring themselves to support the bill—it's not usually in their DNA; it certainly runs against a decade of their record—and to ensure its quick passage through the Senate so that workers who are being exploited right now across our country can start to be confident of being able to speak up without fear of criminal prosecution and start to expose those employers who are systematically rorting and abusing the system, who are not just hurting the exploited migrant workers but driving down the wages of Australian workers. (Time expired)

Debate adjourned.

Ordered that the resumption of the debate be made an order of the day for a later hour.

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