Michael McCormack (Riverina, National Party, Shadow Minister for International Development and the Pacific) Share this | Hansard source

It's not often I find myself in furious agreement with the Greens leader, the member for Melbourne, but the points he made towards the end of his contribution were quite correct. People who come to this country to work, under whatever visa arrangements, should be treated every bit as fairly and equally as Australian workers and should be paid their due amount. In that respect I agree with him. I don't think anybody in the parliament would not concur with that.

The Migration Amendment (Strengthening Sponsorship and Nomination Processes) Bill 2024 is policy that the coalition generally supports the intent of, but there are some concerns. I appreciate that these will also be flagged when this reaches the Senate. There are concerns about the process to determine if an occupation is on the relevant skilled occupation list.

I will digress a little bit. I well remember, when I was the Deputy Prime Minister and we were putting in place new visa arrangements for certain occupations—and the member for Flynn will be interested in this—we had a list of occupations that came under these skilled clauses, and one of the skilled occupations that was not on the list was truck driver. I note that Ron Finemore, who has his own transport company—synonymous with the red-and-green livery—advertises all the time in my local newspaper, the Daily Advertiser, and online for truckies. Finemore has searched all around the world for truck drivers. He, like many other regional truck companies, has B-doubles and other rigs backed up to fences in their yards because they simply can't find workers. And yet it wasn't on that skilled occupations list that we had in place, and I think it was a missed opportunity. I know the member for Gladstone has a heavy vehicle drivers licence. He's the proud owner of a very fine Mac truck semitrailer, and he knows just how important trucks are, particularly in Queensland—a large state with lots of goods, cattle and other stock to be moved around.

Truckies keep our country moving. I defy anybody to deny that a truck driver who can reverse a B-double into some of those tight nooks and crannies, particularly around supermarkets, is skilled. If that isn't highly skilled, then I'm badly mistaken. But we didn't do it. It was a missed opportunity at the outset, and I think in any of these skilled migration clauses, acts, bills, lists—call them what you like—truck drivers should be on the list, if not top of the list.

How quickly will the skilled occupation list be able to be changed to respond to changes in certain occupations? That is a consideration I raise. How will one list address geographic skills gaps? You would know full well, Deputy Speaker, being the member for Lingiari, that outstanding electorate in the Northern Territory—and I'm very proud of the role I played to continue to have Lingiari as a House of Representatives seat—just how important it is to have those skills gaps filled in our regional electorates. I don't think our city friends get it. I'll just put that. It doesn't matter what side of politics they are on. I just don't think they understand the complexities of regional living, particularly outback living. I admire those members who are in those larger sprawling outback electorates for the job they do advocating here to get more skilled people in their electorates. So thank you, Deputy Speaker Scrymgour, for what you do.

Another consideration is: how quickly will the list be able to be adjusted to seasonal requirements? I know that, unfortunately, Labor is axing the live sheep trade, and shame on Labor for doing that. You get these city types who get up here with their prepared notes, saying, 'Let's just send the Gulf states chilled boxed sheepmeat.' Well, they don't want it. They want live sheep offloaded off ships—off Australian ships with very high animal welfare standards—to have for their own processing. The city members won't get that, but we get it because we're from the bush and we get it because we have farmers, particularly stock producers, who come to our electorate offices and tell us of the hardships they have to find people. They tell us of the hardships they have to truck their stock. And they tell us of all the other factors that are important considerations in the important work they do—and the important work they do is to feed us and to feed other nations besides.

It is more than that. Try finding enough workers to fill the roles required in abattoirs. It's very seasonal work. It's hard enough to find them in Wagga Wagga, where we have the biggest livestock exchange in the Southern Hemisphere, let alone in Forbes, which is also in my electorate for the time being, where we have the second-biggest livestock centre in the Southern Hemisphere. Wagga Wagga has a fine cattle processing plant. Forbes is trying to reopen an abattoir; they have plans to do just that sometime in the future. I know the Cootamundra meat works has reopened and is now doing multispecies, where before, when it was owned by the Manildra Group, it was only doing sheep. But they're in places where there are plenty of workers. Try finding workers, skilled or otherwise, to fill those places, to build the new abattoirs, in outback, remote Australia. Good luck! But you'll get the teals standing up and saying, 'Let's just build more abattoirs.' Yeah, let's build rainbow land while we're at it! It's just nonsense. They don't get it. They don't understand it. They never go beyond the sandstone curtain that is the Blue Mountains to ever find out what's going on in regional Australia, and then they expect to lecture us in their pious, perfectionist way. They're absolutely sanctimonious. I hope, when I come back in my next life, that I can be as perfect and pious as one of them. But let's move on.

How well will the skilled occupation list cater for the different employment needs across regional areas? This is simply unknown. I know when I visited the Northern Territory, as I did often when I was the Deputy Prime Minister, how hard it was to find mango pickers. We've got fine mangos up in the Northern Territory, some of the best in Australia, but it's really hard to find people to do that job. Some city types will tell you: 'Well, that's just picking mangoes. How hard can it be?' But it's very hard. It's very tough. It's backbreaking work, and it's also a skill. There's a lot of skill required to do that. There are real concerns, and it is unknown how well Jobs and Skills Australia will function and respond to the needs of the employment market. That's the other consideration that we do need to take into account—how Jobs and Skills Australia will adapt and adopt this particular legislation once the bill has passed.

It's unknown as well what influence the unions will have on shaping the jobs on the skilled occupation list. Will we have the CFMEU limiting the number of builders who are allowed to get a visa, so that they can artificially prop up their ridiculous, exorbitant wage demands? This has to be a real consideration. You had the CFMEU there just recently wanting to stop all work on AFL projects simply because they didn't like somebody who was in charge of the AFL umpires. So John Setka and his thug mates tried to bully-boy the AFL into sacking the bloke. This is Australia. It's not Europe decades ago. It's not Britain prior to Maggie Thatcher. We don't get run by the unions. Labor might take a lot of donations from them, but it's this parliament that runs the nation. I'd like to think that we do it in a fair, appropriate way. That is why we have one of the highest minimum wages if not the highest in the world. We do.

Just last week, I was in Morocco, and I was amazed whilst I was in Casablanca to see the Hassan II Mosque. This particular mosque was built at a cost of $700 million. I know they don't like to talk about that, because it's not about the dollars; it's about the faith and what it represents—the symbolism it brings. That's fair enough. But it was built because King Mohammed VI wanted to inspire the next line of apprentices. The ground for the mosque was broken on 12 July 1986, and it was completed on 30 August 1993. And you should see it. It is an edifice to be admired. If there were a current Seven Wonders of the World, it would be amongst them. It is one of the largest mosques in all of Africa, if not the world, and they built it with apprentices, on budget and on time. I must say—I looked at this, having been the former infrastructure minister, with a little bit of envy. That's because I thought, 'Imagine if we tried to build something—' I mean, just imagine trying to build anything in Australia! You've got to go through cultural, heritage and environment considerations. That's fair enough, too, but we put everything up against trying to build anything. We sometimes are a banana republic and will build absolutely nothing anywhere or near anything. Sadly, that is often the case.

This bill is important. The three proposed income thresholds will replace the current situation. The minimum income thresholds are the specialist skills income threshold, the core skills income threshold and the essential skills income threshold, which I appreciate is continuing to be developed by the sitting government. The bill proposes that the amounts for the SSIT and CSIT will be indexed each year on 1 July. That's fair enough. Submissions have been put forward to the Senate committee. They raised the issue of wage disparity between visa holders being paid the SSIT and the CSIT, which could cause wages disparity to an Australian worker performing an Australian role. We don't want that; of course we don't. I will digress a little bit in the time remaining. I hark back to the Pacific Australia Labour Mobility scheme changes that Labor introduced at the behest of their Labor mates. I arked up about it. Thankfully, Labor changed it so that it wouldn't make a minimum number of hours per week, but they spread it over a longer period. And you'd appreciate this, Deputy Speaker Scrymgour, because it was about seasonality. Why would you be paying someone who's just going to be sitting around in a part-time capacity a full-time wage, when they can't do anything because of weather or other considerations?

Thankfully, the government made changes—sensibly, because farmers were walking away from it, and, dare I say it, the Pacific island nations were walking away from it. Thankfully, some sanity prevailed. But I do worry, because the changes have been put in place for only 12 months. That needs to be rectified about mid next year.

This particular bill is important. It is, as it says, strengthening sponsorship and nomination processes—if it lives up to its name. I know Labor are always very clever with the titles that they put over their bills; they make out that the bill's going to be the be-all and catch-all. But if it does what the title of the bill suggests, then well and good. If it does that, that's great. But I do urge and encourage the minister to give every consideration to what regional stakeholders think and need and want and expect, because all too often this government, which is very antirural, forgets those people who put the food on our plates and the fibre on our backs.

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