James Stevens (Sturt, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Government Waste Reduction) Share this | Hansard source

I commend the contribution from the member for Wentworth and agree with many of the important points that she made. I approach this from a similar respective. We in the coalition are very open minded to what, at face value, the government is looking to do here. But there are some broader issues with the skilled migration system that this doesn't come close to touching on or addressing, and I hope that the government is looking at further opportunities of reform there.

The member for Wentworth made some important points around a lack of flexibility in the system. Of course there are vested interests that exert a great deal of pressure over legislation in this area, particularly when there are Labor governments in power. We know that the union movement have very strict requirements that they put on their wholly owned political subsidiary, the Labor Party. It costs the unions a lot of money to elect Labor governments—ten and tens of millions of dollars. The unions have to make sure that they get full value from putting that money into the Labor Party. On legislation like this, they always make sure that it's 100 per cent in line with what they want or else. Everyone knows that's the business model. Very often reforms that Labor governments bring in this area and in many others are all about the union movement and not about the actual needs of the Australian economy.

I heard the brief contribution from the Greens leader. I don't usually pay a lot of attention, but I pricked up on this one. As I usually do, I just always push back. The Greens seem to have this default position that employers are inherently looking to exploit their workers and that any piece of legislation to do with workplaces or migration has to be all about the fact that the evil employer is always looking for an opportunity to exploit their workers. This is complete rubbish. There are obviously instances of bad behaviour that occur in any part of our society, but to all the employers out there, particularly the small businesses and particularly those in areas with substantial skills shortages who are looking to the migration system to fill very important skills gaps: we in the Liberal Party certainly don't have a default attitude towards you that you're all about trying to exploit someone—because you're actually not. I haven't ever had anything to do with a business like that in my electorate, whether I've worked with them on issues like we're debating right now around sponsoring skilled migration, or any other issues that they have with their businesses' needs from a policy point of view, or about what we can be doing here in Canberra to help them more. They value their workforce and they look for every opportunity to do right by their workers.

In the employment market that we've got right now, employers aren't exploiting workers; they're desperately trying to retain workers. They're competing with their fellow employers because we have these dramatic skills shortages in so many parts of our economy. We have unemployment in the low fours—it has been dropping down into the high threes. When I studied economics, five per cent was considered full employment as a sort of orthodoxy, and we've been way under five per cent for almost the entirety of my time serving in this parliament. The Greens, as usual, are way off on that, but no-one is surprised.

When it comes to our migration system and legislation like this that's talking about creating new ways to deal temporary skilled migration and the three streams, I think it's important, firstly, that we recognise there's a difference between the policies for the migration system and the administration over the migration system. Some people seem to think that policy is the big problem that absolutely has to be focused on and addressed—and there are policy issues with the way in which the detail of the system is run. But it's the administration, in my experience, at a case-by-case level working with businesses in my electorate—before I was a member of parliament, working with the system on the other side of it, being in business and trying to, at times, sponsor skilled workers or use a range of other solutions that you thought would be straightforward and obvious—that is spectacularly complex. The administration of the system is something that we don't spend enough time talking about.

Policy settings are going to be set by the government of the day, firstly around the size of the migration program, how that breaks down between skilled migration and the humanitarian program, family reunion, the student visa system and all the rest of it. Those policy settings are very important at the macro level but, equally, the way in which we administer achieving these policies, in my experience at a case-by-case level, rarely fulfils what the hope was of the policies when they were set. We in the coalition have been very clear that we think the overall migrant intake is too high right now. Obviously, there was always going to be a rocky period—rocky around the scale of migration—because of the snap back that was always going to be occur post the border being closed for these few years during COVID pandemic. But we're well beyond re-corrections from that time, and we've had, under this government, extremely high migration settings for enduring period. The opposition leader made it clear in his budget reply this year that a coalition government will reduce the overall migration intake program, and we feel that's extremely necessary, particularly to address serious, acute policy issues that have come up because of that rapid, dramatic, galloping of a population growth rate in the last few years, in areas like housing and many others.

But whatever the macro figure for migration might be, the way in which we achieve that and the pathways that are available to people through that and the sorts of people that we prioritise through that, regardless of what the total number is, are just as important, if not more important. I am from South Australia. We've always been underrepresented in our share of migration. If you want to use a per-capita metric, that might be the easiest and the most fair. We have migration sitting in the national space, and that's very difficult. There have been attempts to try and give special treatment to particular regions et cetera, but it has invariably been the case for a long, long time, particularly before COVID, that the vast majority of migration into this country has gone into the three big population centres of Melbourne, Sydney and South-East Queensland, and we seem to be reverting to having these same challenges right now.

Before COVID, Melbourne was growing at about 100,000 people a year. It has probably returned to this. That was not entirely migration, obviously, but a huge proportion of that was migrants, and it was creating great distortions in our economy. It is not good for the people of Melbourne for its population to grow too quickly. As much as it's not good for some of the small towns in South Australia to have dramatic shortages in many, many skills, lots of which would not be picked up in the legislation that we're debating right now, ultimately it's quite appealing to move to Melbourne if you come to Australia through the migration program. People from Melbourne will probably nod along with that and say, 'Yes, absolutely.'

I don't begrudge Melbourne—or Sydney or South-East Queensland—being a great destination. But when we think of the skilled migration program, it's particularly important that it's achieving something much more important, which is that it's providing the entirety of our economy—every geographic part of our economy—with what the skilled migration stream is meant to provide, which is that it is addressing labour shortages not just in particular skills but in particular geographic parts of our economy. COVID disrupted this greatly. Given my background in South Australia, both with the then Premier and, before that, in the wool textile sector, I'd been hoping to spend a lot of my first term trying to see some reform in that area—a bit like the way the Canadians, in particular, have a more robust structure for providing people with pathways into particular geographic parts of Canada.

Rather than letting people who say, 'Yes, I absolutely want to go and work in a regional centre in South Australia. I'd love the South Australian government to put me on their sponsored list and get me into the country. But, equally, once I'm in, I may not fulfil the promise to be in the regional skilled migration scheme that was implicitly made by being sponsored into the country,' come into Australia—perhaps you were sponsored by the South Australia government with an expectation, because you said so when you applied, that you wanted to work in the agricultural sector in the Riverland or in the mining sector in the far north and, instead, at the first opportunity, you went to the magnetic parts of the country like Sydney, Melbourne and South-East Queensland—I still am a strong, firm believer, like so many in the South Australia business community in particular, in looking for a more robust way to bring geography into the skilled migration scheme. This bill, to my understanding, doesn't envisage that. It obviously looks at skills. It looks at the three categories. But we're still not going down the path that I and I think all sides of politics from South Australia and probably other places like Tasmania would like to see us go down, which is that we need to address the challenges that we've got in attracting people coming through the skilled migration program to actually come to our parts of Australia. There is an opportunity to look for reform in that area.

We in the coalition are happy to see this bill progress. There's a Senate committee that we want to reflect these submissions through et cetera but we're here to work with the government in constructive ways to address the challenges of the skills crisis, and a more robust framework for the skilled migration scheme will do so.

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