Tim Watts (Gellibrand, Australian Labor Party, Assistant Minister for Foreign Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

Australia is a proud migrant nation. That wonderful Indigenous leader Noel Pearson says that you cannot tell the story of Australia without telling three stories. First is the 65,000 years of continuous Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture that is the foundation of our society. Then there are the Westminster institutions, the democratic norms and the rule of law that followed. Finally, there is multicultural migration that has so enriched our nation in recent decades. You can't tell the one story of Australia without telling those three stories. Indeed, today half of Australians either were born overseas or have a parent who was born overseas. My community is central to this success story. More than two-thirds of my constituents were born overseas or have a parent who was born overseas. Australia, as a result, is a prosperous, safe and cohesive country. We are the greatest multicultural success story in the world, and our migration system through the years has enabled that. In the past, when our nation has confronted crises and challenges, we've used our migration system to help us build a better country for the next generation.

Unfortunately, the previous government's neglect of immigration policy, this critical part of our national identity, this strategically crucial part of our economy, this foundation stone of our community, has created and bequeathed an immigration system to the incoming Albanese government that, as Minister O'Neil has said, 'favoured temporary migration in increasingly lower-paid jobs'—and these are the two essential ingredients of the worker exploitation that we know is occurring in Australia's workplaces. Those opposite left our migration settings on cruise control for a decade, and the system drove into a ditch.

Over the last decade, story after story has emerged about the exploitation of migrant workers in our community. I've said repeatedly in this chamber, on the other side of this place, that this was one of the great scandals of our time. It was one of the great stains on our national character. We had in recent years the infamous 7-Eleven case, where we saw intimidation and threats of deportation against staff. We saw systemic underpayment and doctoring of payroll records. Through the class action process against 7-Eleven we saw that one worker was being paid as little as 47c an hour and we saw that 7-Eleven underpaid their workers by $173 million.

We've also seen research that says 60 per cent of international students in Sydney earn less than the national minimum wage, with even more missing out on other mandatory workplace benefits, including casual loading. As in the case of 7-Eleven, these people are particularly vulnerable to coercive threats of deportation, which could means fears about losing the opportunity to complete their study despite the huge financial and emotional downpayments made by them and their families. Because of these coercive threats, we know that many workers are terrified to speak up. A Grattan Institute report from this year found:

Recent migrants are 40 per cent more likely to be underpaid than long-term residents with the same skills and experience and who work in the same job.

The Grattan Institute report found that up to one in six migrants are paid less than the minimum wage. The report also found that, while temporary visa holders made up four per cent of the workplace, they made up to 26 per cent of all litigation initiated for a breach of the Fair Work Act in the year 2021-22.

A report from Unions NSW found that over one in five workers are paid a lower salary because of their visa status or nationality, and migrant workers are also more likely to miss out on paid leave, overtime and superannuation.

This exploitation is devastating for every worker. These are hardworking people contributing to Australia's economy who, to date, have fallen through the cracks in our system. In a country which prides itself on egalitarian values, a nation built on immigrant success stories, this is a national shame. It's a disgrace. And those opposite did nothing about it for far too long.

As the Grattan Institute said earlier this year, 'If we don't take wage theft more seriously it will keep happening.' And as Professor Allan Fels, the Chair of the Migrant Workers Taskforce, said in June this year, this exploitation:

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

Nothing was done about it by those opposite during their time in government. This crucial area of national economic policy and national cultural policy was left on cruise control. The previous government did not act. In fact, they wilfully oversaw systemic exploitation of migrant workers across Australia. The 7-Eleven scandal, which rocked Australia, led to no action by the former government. The former government did not implement the key recommendations from the Migrant Workers Taskforce, which reported to the Morrison government in 2019. Two years after the publication of the task force's report, they did introduce a bill, but it was a bill which was never even brought forward for debate in this place, let alone for a vote.

The Migrant Workers Taskforce report was another report in a long succession that were left on the shelf by the previous government. The announcements were made, the social media posts were put out there, and they said, 'Job done!' The marketing was done but no substantive reform was delivered, and therefore the problem continued. The previous government sat on their hands, which pretty much sums up their attitude to resolving this systemic and devastating problem.

On top of doing nothing to solve the problem, those opposite preferred temporary visas to permanent ones. The effect of the migration system they presided over was actually to make it easier for crooked employers to target vulnerable migrant workers. They looked the other way. They allowed long-running abuse of some of the most structurally vulnerable people in our society to continue.

That's why we're reforming these laws. That's why this bill is before the House. We have listened to the recommendations from the 2019 Migrant Workers Taskforce final report, and through this legislation we are implementing recommendation 19 and recommendation 20 of the report. We've listened to recommendation 19, which was to strengthen our legislation so that any employer or individual who coerces workers, such as by using a worker's visa status to exploit them, is guilty of an offence. We've also listened to recommendation 20, in prohibiting employers and individuals who have been found to exploit workers from hiring workers on temporary visas. These reforms will provide strong incentives for employers to do the right thing by their workers.

After a decade of inaction, the Albanese Labor government is tackling the exploitation of migrant workers in this country, and it's not before time. The Migration Amendment (Strengthening Employer Compliance) Bill 2023 will establish new criminal and civil offences for coercing people to work in breach of their visa conditions or for using visa status to exploit workers. It will prohibit employers and individuals who have exploited migrants from hiring future workers on temporary visas. It will align and increase penalties for work related breaches. It will provide for an enforceable undertaking for work related breaches and compliance notices to employers who breach relevant Migration Act and Migration Regulations rules, and it will reform the law so that the exploitation of a worker may be considered as a potential mitigating factor when visa cancellation is under consideration. These reforms are not before time. The Grattan Institute has expressed its support for the bill:

We support the Bill's expansion of the powers of the Australian Border Force (ABF) to crack down on unscrupulous employers and prevent employers found to be taking advantage of migrant workers from hiring temporary migrants.

These aren't the only reforms that the Albanese Labor government is making to our visa and migration system—a visa and migration system which is not fit for purpose and which creates vulnerabilities for workers across our economy. Since coming to government, we've slashed the backlog of visa applications, from just under a million in the pipeline to now less than 600,000, and the citizenship backlog is now less than 80,000; that's the lowest level in six years. In the last 10 years, not one MP in this House could do a street stall in the Australian community without somebody coming up begging for action on visa processing times—people who would jump through all of the hoops required to receive the Holy Grail that is Australian citizenship and were stuck in a bureaucratic purgatory. People in my community started to draw inferences about the conduct of the previous government. There are large parts of my community that believe those opposite didn't want visa, PR and citizenship applications to be processed, because they didn't think it was in their political interests, thinking those people would hold Labor values. That is something that was raised with me regularly in the electorate. The incompetence of those opposite—their lack of prioritisation for creating new Australians—is inexplicable without that explanation, in my view.

Anybody who is worth their salt in this place will have spent a lot of time in Australian citizenship ceremonies. They're one of the best parts of the job. Looking someone in the eye who has just received Australian citizenship, seeing how important it is to them—you can't get through a citizenship ceremony in this country without someone being in tears. Seeing how important it is to these people, I think the failure to process citizenship applications was one of the great scandals of the previous government. It was just indefensible. We've gotten to work on fixing it, and the citizenship backlog is now less than 80,000—the lowest it's been in six years.

We've also established a pathway to Australian citizenship for New Zealanders in this country. It's a crucial thing in communities like mine with big Kiwi Pasifika communities. These are people who lived in a state of limbo in our society, mates from across the ditch, equal in all ways except for their status in Australia. It's particularly harsh on the children of those families. It was a foolish decision by the Howard government, the consequences of which grew over time, and this Labor government is fixing it. We're dealing with the problem.

We've also commissioned a review of the Australia's migration system, led by former Secretary of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, Dr Martin Parkinson. That review described the migration system as broken. As I said earlier, this was a system that was on cruise control for the better part of a decade, and it ran into a ditch. It became more and more complex and less and less adequately funded, and it became less and less fit for purpose. We need a migration system that serves our nation by delivering the skills that Australian businesses need and the nation-building that our country was built on. Since this review was released, in April, the Albanese Labor government has been consulting widely on the development of a migration strategy, which will be released later this year. It will deliver a new approach to skilled migration, helping to drive productivity growth and wage growth while ensuring migration is better managed and integrated with the levers that make migration successful.

The reforms to the Migration Act in this bill will ensure that migrant workers are treated respectfully and honourably and are paid what they rightly deserve. I would just emphasise to the House, in my capacity as the Assistant Minister for Foreign Affairs, that the world watches how we treat migrants in our country. We're not a country of guest workers. We're a country where workers should be treated equally and fairly in the workplace. It's what our country was built on. When I am overseas, I am commonly asked by international peers about how members of their diaspora are treated in Australia, about their status in our community, about their status in our educational institutions, about their status in our workplaces. We need to be able to look our international peers in the eye and say that in Australia everyone is treated equally, everyone is treated fairly, there is no underclass, there is no guest work, there is no vulnerable exploited class in our society. The exploitation of migrant workers enabled by the previous government hurt Australia's reputation internationally.

Equally, these reforms will be closely observed. They will be important for our relationships across the Indo-Pacific—relationships with countries who send their students to our universities, relationships with countries who send their young people to our country on working holidays. They will be able to look to Australia and know that their students, their children, their young people will be protected from exploitation. They will be able to work here and study here free from coercion and free from exploitation. That's why these reforms are so important.

As Minister Giles has said, this bill recognises that when people vulnerable to exploitation are mistreated, we all suffer. It recognises the contribution being made by so many workers and the importance of addressing the corrosive nature of expectation in workplaces across the country. Worker exploitation hurts everyone and only benefits wrongdoers. It's up to government to stamp it out, and that's what this bill is about. I commend the bill to the House.

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