Allegra Spender (Wentworth, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Migration Amendment (Strengthening Sponsorship and Nomination Processes) Bill 2024. Introduced back in July, this bill implements several parts of the government's migration strategy. This includes setting index linked salary thresholds for the skills in demand visa, including the specialist skills pathway for those earning at least $135,000, the core skills pathway for those earning at least $70,000 with an occupation on the core skills occupation list and the essential skills pathway for those earning under $70,000 but who work in essential skills occupations.

These are positive changes. They reflect the need for our migration program to focus on bringing the best and the brightest to Australia, to do so in a way that is quicker and simpler for employers and employees alike, to give migrants clearer pathways to permanency and more opportunity to move employers, and to take a risk based approach to preventing exploitation and abuse. These are the kinds of changes that I and many others have called for since before the election, and they will be welcome in Wentworth.

I speak to many people in the technology sector and the venture capital sector and I ask them, 'What are some of the greatest barriers to growing your companies as you want to?' They often tell me, 'Just the skills, and the need to bring people with great experience into Australia to help turbocharge our most innovative companies.' So I think this is a great opportunity here. Similarly, I get many constituents who talk about the challenges of their visa processing times and the amount of uncertainty that comes with long processing times and not knowing how long they have to wait. In some cases, they've chosen to go to other countries or other opportunities or have forgone opportunities because of that uncertainty. So I think the government's commitment to this area is really important.

I'm particularly supportive of the introduction of the specialist skills pathway, which will help fast-track the arrival of the highest skilled and highest earning migrants to Australia. By ditching our outdated occupation list in favour of a simple salary threshold and introducing a seven-day service standard for processing applications, this specialist skills pathway recognises that Australia is in the global talent race and that allowing businesses to quickly and flexibly recruit the migrants they need is central to bringing the best and brightest to Australia. The new pathway recognises that highly skilled migrants are a key contributor to our economic prosperity, helping to accelerate productivity growth, enhancing the skills of the Australians they work alongside and making a significant contribution to public finances. The visa will help Australia attract the engineers we need to transition to a net zero economy, the cyberspecialists we need to help our banking system stay secure and the data scientists we need to harness the potential of AI. With the average permanent skilled migrant contributing almost $200,000 to government budgets over their lifetime, the fiscal dividend is expected to be significant.

However, for the specialist skills pathway to be successful it is critical that this visa stream remain open to all occupations. Whether a migrant works in construction or computing, we want to welcome the best and brightest to our shores when we need them most. That is why I'm so concerned by the government's decision to exclude trade workers, machine operators, drivers and labourers from this visa pathway. The government has not articulated a clear rationale for this decision, and the decision doesn't appear to be aligned with the broader Migration Strategy or the findings of Martin Parkinson's 2023 review. Indeed, there is no clear reason why a sector-agnostic visa pathway based on a high salary threshold is appropriate for every occupation in Australia except those related to construction.

I acknowledge that we need to get the balance right in our migration system but I am deeply concerned that this carve-out has more to do with pressure from interest groups and the CFMEU than it has to do with what is best for our construction sector. When an employer is willing to pay a salary of more than $135,000 plus the associated visa and accreditation fees, there is very low risk that the migrant will displace a domestic worker, and there is very low risk of the worker being subject to exploitation. In the design of the specialist skills pathway, this logic has been accepted by the government for every other sector in the economy, but for some reason the government believes this does not apply to tradies. Instead, this carve-out creates additional hurdles for skilled migrants in construction, increasing the complexity of the overall migration program and effectively creating a two-tier system with different rules for so-called blue-collar and white-collar workers. The Chief Executive Officer of the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Andrew McKellar, said:

These are distinctions that don't fit into the modern economy.

If you clear the salary threshold to enter the high-skilled tier, you should be allowed to apply for the visa. Your occupation should not factor into the equation.

The last thing we need is a system where the highly skilled tradespeople Australia desperately needs are being treated like second-class workers.

The decision to exclude construction workers from the specialist skills pathway comes at a time when we urgently need to expand the construction workforce. Master Builders anticipate that at least half a million workers need to enter the industry by 2029 to maintain business-as-usual construction levels, and an even higher number is required if we're to meet the Housing Accord target of building 1.2 million homes over the next five years and achieve net zero by 2050. Speak to anybody running a building site and they will tell you they are desperate for staff, particularly in highly skilled roles. But, despite the imperative of expanding our construction workforce, the building industry is struggling. According to Master Builders, the sector recruited only around half of the additional workers it needed in the first half of 2024, and new construction apprenticeships actually fell in 2023.

The government has made some welcome commitments to expanding the domestic construction workforce through initiatives such as fee-free TAFE, but we must acknowledge that skilled migrants also have a role to play, just like they have a role to play in building the vibrant economy and society that we enjoy today. This is particularly the case for high-skill, high-earning parts of the building sector. These workers are in short supply in Australia. They are difficult and expensive to recruit and cannot be trained domestically in a short timeframe. Skilled migration is therefore an important tool in making sure Australia has the construction workforce it needs.

While I support this bill, it is clear that the carve-out of construction workers from the specialist skills pathway is unjustified. I urge the government to remove the carve-out of tradies from this visa stream and allow construction workers the same access to this new fast-tracked visa that every other occupation has. If the government is not willing to do this, I urge the government to ensure that tradies across the spectrum are given access to the other skills pathways so that we can get the tradespeople we desperately need into the country and at the speed at which we need them.

I'd like to make two further comments relating both to the bill and to migration more broadly. One of the reasons that I support this bill is that we do need to restructure our migration system. Some of the most heartbreaking cases I get in Wentworth are those of people who have spent many years in Australia going from temporary visa to temporary visa. These people spend up to a decade in this country with the hope of permanent migration. Currently our migration system, through its complexity but also because it hasn't dealt with issues in relation to temporary visa holders, means that we are selling many of these people a lie—the hope of being able to stay in this country when ultimately they can't. So, while I very much support these new pathways the government is providing and the focus on speed, I think we absolutely need to make sure that we can find ways to support the temporary skilled workers that we already have and find ways to make sure that we don't continue to actually bring in people who have an expectation of being able to stay in Australia but ultimately have no real prospect of doing so, because I think we're letting them down.

The second issue I'd like to raise in relation to skills is again the access to these skilled workers, particularly for the hospitality industry. I hear consistently from the hospitality industry that they are really in need of key workers. I know that they have come together in relation to some of these pathways, and I think that is really important because, again, many of these skilled people in the industry have been some of those temporary workers going from temporary visa to temporary visa with no real prospect of permanency despite building deep relationships and making significant contributions to our country.

Finally I would like to briefly talk about aged-care workers. We all recognise in this country that we are in desperate need of healthcare workers and particularly aged-care workers. The government has introduced some pathways, in particular for aged-care workers, but the way in which it has done this troubles me and certainly troubles many of the aged-care companies that I have spoken to in my electorate. The current requirement for the companies to be able to access special pathways to bring in aged-care workers is that they have to sign a pretty onerous MOU with one or a number of unions in the sector regarding the obligations that the union will basically impose on this business.

I accept that unions play an important role in our economy, but, for workplaces which are not already unionised, I find it really concerning that the visa system is being used as a way to drive unionisation or union activity in workplaces and there's no alternative for a workplace and for workers who say: 'We don't want a union focused memorandum of understanding. We would like one working with, for instance, the Fair Work Commission.' We do need to prevent exploitation in our industries and we do need to make sure that we can bring people in, but we need to do this in a way that is appropriate for our workplaces, and I don't think it is appropriate for the unions to have control over which people and which companies are able to bring workers into this country or not. I believe that should certainly be the role of government, not of unions.

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