Adam Bandt (Melbourne, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That this bill be now read a second time.

I will speak very briefly. The seconder of this motion, the member for Kennedy, is not on the speaking list. To allow him time to speak I will speak very briefly. I refer members and those interested in this to my speech when this bill was introduced.

At the moment enterprise migration agreements can have a massive impact on the Australian labour market, yet they are completely unregulated. The immigration minister is in effect able to have a big impact on wages and conditions in this country. The Protecting Local Jobs (Regulating Enterprise Migration Agreements) Bill 2012 not only will ensure greater transparency but will put the government to the obligation of applying a simple test. Before an enterprise migration agreement can be signed it will have to be shown that the employer has advertised the job locally and it has not been able to be filled. That is a very simple test and one that I think most people in this country would agree with as a sensible precondition before we seek workers from offshore.

Bob Katter (Kennedy, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I have pleasure in seconding the motion on the second reading of the Protecting Local Jobs (Regulating Enterprise Migration Agreements) Bill 2012. In Queensland, I think the sale of the railways damaged the government in such a way that it could never recover. Also, I think the flying in of 1,740 miners from overseas to make Gina Rinehart richer will damage this government in much the same way. They do not stand up to talk politics, having said that—because I am just trying to scare you blokes into doing the right thing. I am afraid that my scare tactics have failed miserably.

According to the paper—I was looking at it just before I came in—the coal seam gas industry is reputed to provide $45 billion to the Australian economy. This is an absolutely colossal amount of money. The people sitting on that side of the House and on this side of the House gave the entire gas industry away to foreigners. Depending on which set of figures you want to use, it was in the range of 83 per cent to 87 per cent, but another seven per cent is being negotiated for sale as we speak. So you are looking at around 90 per cent of the industry being foreign owned.

The $45 billion comes into Australia at Gladstone and at the two liquefaction plants in Western Australia, and there is one proposed for the Northern Territory. There are no wages—it is just in a pipe with a motor pumping the gas without any requirement for labour. Yes, there will be about 4,000 jobs, but what Australia will be getting out of this vast resource is very, very small beer. We have the highest electricity charges in the world. A lot of other countries have reserved the gas so that they can provide cheap electricity. We have the cheapest electricity in the world in Queensland because my mentor, the great Ron Camm, had taken one-tenth of Utah's coal, and taken it for free, and fired up the Gladstone power station, which was one of the biggest in the world at the time.

Charlie McDonald, the first member for Kennedy—you will see his wonderful painting as you walk out of here—was one of the founders of the labour movement in Australia. His first seven speeches in this place were about shipped-in foreign workers. The founding principles of the Labor Party were that we had fought and literally died. Three people were shot dead at Dagwood Station—Waltzing Matilda—in the sit-in that occurred there. They were bringing these people in from overseas to undermine our pay and conditions that we had fought so hard for. It is eternally shameful to be associated with the current government in Australia, which has been the government responsible not only for the fly-ins but also the section 457s. Opposition spokesman Mr Bourke criticised the Liberal Party about it. They brought in many more section 457s than anyone else. In many towns, like Mackay, Mount Isa and even my own town, Cloncurry, it is becoming 'Spot the Australian', because they are all foreign fly-in workers. If they are working for Australian pay and conditions then I am a Martian astronaut! And all of this is to make Mrs Rinehart rich. You must really be very committed to looking after the billionaires of Australia when you have given all the gas resources away to foreigners. (Time expired)

Stephen Jones (Throsby, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I welcome the debate and am enjoying the debate. It is at times confused. We have spent as much time on coal-seam gas as we did on EMAs. But it is always entertaining. What I find interesting about the proposition is that it has been brought before the House by the member of Melbourne—in goodwill—to restrict migration into this country of skilled workers needed in areas of workforce shortage. It follows hot on the heels of attempts by the member for Melbourne and others in his party to have effectively an uncapped refugee program in this country. We have a confused migration debate surrounding this particular issue.

I want to say a couple of things about the issue. I come from the electorate of Throsby in Illawarra, New South Wales; in my electorate one in four workers comes from somewhere else. If you walk down the main street of any suburb in my electorate on any day, you could hear Macedonian, Italian, Greek, Scottish, Irish and English accents, and that is before you get to the corner. They have all come to Australia in search of work and a better life. We are not unfamiliar with people coming to Australia, bringing their skills, their hopes and their wishes to this country, looking for a better life and opportunities in our workforce. There is nothing new about us bringing new migrant workers into this country.

It is equally true that there is deep unease within the community surrounding 457 visas and enterprise migration agreements. If you drill into the heart of the concerns about these two issues, it gets down to one simple proposition, which is that if we have both unemployment and job opportunities in this country then the job opportunities should be going to the people who are unemployed ahead of us bringing people in from other places.

Bob Katter (Kennedy, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

There are 200,000 in Queensland and 80,000 in WA.

Stephen Jones (Throsby, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

You have had your opportunity, Bob, and it was very entertaining. It was not on point, but it was very entertaining. The objective is to give Australians the first crack at a job, whether it is in the resource sector or anywhere else. That is a proposition that I wholeheartedly support.

The problem with the proposition is that it is misconceived on one particular point, which I will go to. It says that EMAs should not be used unless a job is advertised. The problem with that is that in most instances the job will not exist at the time that the enterprise migration agreement is struck, because an enterprise migration agreement is an agreement which is struck before a project actually starts. It is struck because a lot of these resource projects are getting up and going in remote parts of Australia where there is not a labour force. The history with many of these companies is that they find it very difficult to attract workers to those places. However, they have to attract finance for the project and they have to get their bankers all lined up and their planning all lined up. The one variable that they cannot get lined up in advance is their labour force. So the enterprise migration agreement is the one piece of the puzzle that can enable the project to get up and running. It is not a blank piece of paper, because all the enterprise migration agreements will have a set of conditions that say you cannot bring somebody in on a 457 visa unless you have met those conditions. One of those conditions is that there is nobody available to employ within Australia. I know from my experience that there have been circumstances where local workers have been overlooked in favour of other people, because I have had these people come into my office and talk to me about it. The problem is not with the enterprise migration agreement; it is with the compliance and the policing of the conditions within that agreement.

I would say that this bill is misconceived. It has a noble purpose. The noble purpose is to ensure that Australian workers are at the front of the queue, but I suggest that there may be better ways of achieving that than the legislation that is currently before the House.

Scott Morrison (Cook, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Immigration and Citizenship) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

We like to speak romantically about the Snowy Mountains Hydro Scheme, the post-war migration labour force that built it and the testament it is to the successful immigration program. But I wonder when I listen to what those in the Labor Party and the trade union movement say about skilled and semi-skilled migration whether these are just stories they like to tell and whether they actually believe the sentiments behind them.

More than 100,000 people, from over thirty countries, came to the mountains to work on that project. Those workers were Australian-born, German, Greek, Irish, Italian, Norwegian, British, Polish and Yugoslav. Up to 7,300 workers provided their labour at any one time. Seventy per cent of all workers were migrants and most migrant workers on the scheme arrived under assisted migration schemes The project cost $820 million to complete at the time and, if repeated today, it would be worth $8 billion to the Australian economy.

In my home town of Sydney, migrants also came to work on another major feat of engineering, the Warragamba Dam—a project that took 20 years to build and at times involved more 1,800 people working across three shifts, seven days a week, to get the job done. The workers were drawn from more than 25 different nationalities. The labour was very difficult and dangerous and 14 men lost their lives in the course of the dam's construction.

A project such as the Snowy, which had an economic contribution of $8 billion in today's terms, makes me think about the Roy Hill Mine project. This project is worth $9.5 billion to Australia, will employ more than 6,000 Australians and requires a maximum of 1,700 foreign skilled workers. Under the agreement, the company will provide up to 2,000 training places for Australians, including 230 apprentices and trainees and preparing 110 indigenous Australians for work in construction. English-language requirements are consistent with what is required under the 457 program, which commenced under the Howard government. The arrangements would be reviewed every six to 12 months, and employers would be bound by migration law to provide overseas workers with the same terms and conditions of employment as Australian project employees. This was all carefully engineered to protect Australian workers and act as a disincentive to the exploitation of foreign labour. If backed up and competently implemented—a big ask for this government—enterprise migration agreements do represent good policy. The government often complains about the lack of support from coalition for their policy measures. We have always said that when you come up with a good policy, we will support. Well guess what? They did. Amazing, I know, but they have come up with a good policy with enterprise migration agreements and we support them.

The government also seeks this bipartisan support, but on the day of the Prime Minister's announcement of the Roy Hill EMA the Prime Minister amazingly claimed to be furious, caved into union pressure and hung her then immigration minister out to dry, casting doubt over the arrangement and the policy. With the departure of that minister, its one remaining champion being the minister for resources, this enterprise migration agreement will be an orphan. We are into another year—this was announced in May—and the agreement and deed has still not been signed. I suppose it is some comfort for the Greens to know that the incompetence of this government will ensure that this EMA will never be signed, it will never happen and they will have nothing to worry about from their perspective. But this creates a real issue in terms of this government's sincerity when they talk about a skilled migration program. When they go out there and talk to investors, they say one thing and announce grand schemes and policies only to never be able to follow through. It now rests with the new Minister for Immigration and Citizenship, from clan O'Connor of the CFMEU clan, who will be there and in a position to oversee whether this arrangement is finalised. I am not going to hold my breath. I do not think the investors will and I do not think the project proponents will, because this policy is withering on the vine and I have no doubt that it will wither with this new union dominated minister.

The bill as intentioned simply tries to add further regulation and further regulatory burden to an already overcomplicated arrangement. The coalition wants to take the regulatory burden off the back of business in this country, not continue to stifle it as this government has done with thousands upon thousands of new regulations bundled onto the back of business in this country and stifling innovation. If you want to know why productivity has fallen off, it is because this government has killed innovation through overregulation. The one key commitment, above all others that the coalition has given to restore productivity, is to attack over regulation. That is why we will not be supporting this bill. We will not be supporting this bill and the government will join us in opposing this bill, but I guarantee you that this government will never sign an EMA.

Andrew Leigh (Fraser, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The former New Zealand politician and head of the World Trade Organisation Michael Moore once had a terrific analogy to describe those who would argue for more foreign aid but also argue for less trade and less migration. He said that attitude was the like the attitude of someone who puts money in the collection plate on Sundays but then behaves badly to the disadvantaged for the rest of the week. It is with the same concern that I rise to speak on this bill today. The attitude that says that we ought to increase our foreign aid, that we ought to increase our refugee intake, but that when workers in our region want to come to Australia to improve their skills and send some remittances back we ought to slam the door in their faces. That is not an attitude that is consistent with the values that I hold dear.

The member for Kennedy was right about one thing in his speech. He said that the old Labor Party would have supported this, and there is an episode of my party's history of which I am not particularly proud. In its early founding in the beginning part of the 20th century it was the party of white Australia and the party that railed against Kanakas. That Labor Party perhaps would have supported this motion, but that Labor Party is gone. Members in this place who said that 'two Wongs don't make a white' have been replaced by members such as Minister Wong, of whom I am greatly proud. Ours is now a party of markets and multiculturalism, a party that recognises that if you do not bring in 1,700 workers to work on a resource project then 6,000 Australian jobs are gone. EMAs are fundamentally about improving the access to megaprojects for Australians. Workers can only come in under EMAs if they are essential to the project. There are key training requirements and this bill would render those EMAs unworkable. Where it does not contain statements of motherhood and statements that are consistent with what occurs already, it requires the tabling in parliament of commercially sensitive information that would then become publicly available. That would cause no company to go ahead with an EMA. As a result, we would have fewer Australian jobs and fewer overseas workers.

Those overseas workers benefit us and they benefit themselves. My colleague Senator Cameron came to Australia through a migration scheme, part of a great post-war migration, and has greatly enriched Australia. But those skills also benefit people in developing countries when they return. Work by Michael Clemens, Claudio Montenegro and Lant Pritchett have estimated that a Haitian who moves to the United States is six times as productive as that very same person was in Haiti. They learn new skills, send money back and often return to their countries to set up businesses.

If you are in favour of reducing global poverty, you should be in favour of EMAs. If you are in favour of boosting Australian jobs, you should be in favour of EMAs. This is a massive boom. We have seen commodity prices go up tenfold. House prices in Moranbah, Queensland, for example, have risen just in one year from $459,000 to $730,000. We have hundreds of Australians flying in and flying out every week, some of them even from Bali. This is a boom the likes of which we have not seen since the gold rushes. Yes, it is placing stresses on the Australian economy, but the right way to respond to those stresses is to make sure that we do not close ourselves off to the world, that we do not make the mistakes that past generations made under White Australia, that we have EMAs with training requirements and that require employers to test the labour market but recognise that guest workers can sometimes make the difference between a project succeeding and a project falling over. Opposition to EMAs can mean that projects will fall over. If you do not want the 1,700 overseas workers, you will not get the 6,000 Aussie jobs and, furthermore, you will not get the development that goes with EMAs.

Debate adjourned.