Lisa Chesters (Bendigo, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Last weekend, most MPs probably went to a best and fairest night for a local football team or a local netball team. In regional Victoria we have been holding several of them. Last week, as the No. 1 ticket holder for the Bendigo Thunder Women's Football Club, I got the chance to pop along to congratulate the girls on a great season. At the event, I got to catch up with lots of the players and just chat to them about what they are doing off the field as well as on the field, and I met a remarkable woman whose story continues to inspire me. She is studying at La Trobe Uni. She is studying for a teaching degree and is moving into her final years, having just completed her placement. She is a fantastic football player, a great community asset and an important person within the club and also works casually for KR Castlemaine, or DON-KR. They are a smallgoods food producer in Castlemaine. They employ quite a few people, including a number of students like this remarkable young woman, on a casual basis. These shifts help them pay for their studies, help them pay their rent and help them buy their textbooks.

But she, like many of the young students and casual workers at KR Castlemaine, has recently lost her shifts. Every week she diligently calls her supervisor to say, 'Is there work available this week?' and the company says, 'No, there are no shifts available.' That is because the company has taken the extraordinary step since before Christmas of using a labour hire firm that hires people here on temporary work visas—the 417 backpacker visa. So you can imagine the frustration of this amazing young woman studying and working to get towards the end of her degree—the frustration that she is losing work to other young people that are here on the backpacker visa. Why? The overseas workers working for the labour hire firm are about $4 an hour cheaper. That is one of the rates. On other rates, they are $7 an hour cheaper. The company has chosen not to back and support local workers but instead has gone for the cheaper alternative: using a labour hire firm that has overseas Taiwanese and Vietnamese temporary workers here on the backpacking visa.

To make matters worse, the company are still advertising for staff. They still have the ads up on seek.com; they still have the ads in the local paper. They are putting false hope out there to other local people who may be looking for work. Some of the people who have applied for jobs have contacted me since this story broke in our local papers before Christmas and said: 'I applied for a job and was told I was unsuccessful before I even got to the interview stage.' Others who have been through the interview stage have then received the generic 'unsuccessful'. Yet we know from the company's admission that they are still engaging between 100 and 150 temporary workers, who are in Australia on a backpacker visa, on a daily and weekly basis.

This is not a stand-alone case. There is a problem with the structure of the working holiday visa in this country. Time and time again we are learning that local kids, local young people, are missing out on work opportunities, on jobs and on casual hours to overseas temporary workers. The subcontractor may be paying people the award, but it is wrong to use the award to undercut the collective agreement that has been bargained in good faith in this one particular worksite. It is wrong when two workers who are standing side by side doing the exact same work get paid differently—one is paid less than the other because of who they are employed by.

The government must act to help clean up this. It is not fair that the overseas workers are (a) being exploited and (b) being used to undercut collective agreements, local wages and conditions that have been negotiated in good faith. It is time this government started to put local young people first. We want to see locals get these job opportunities first before companies look to the overseas workers. It is not fair and it is not right. To local people looking for work: keep looking and keep speaking up because we on this side of the House will not abandon you.