Tony Zappia (Makin, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Manufacturing) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That this House:

(1) notes that as at:

(a) 31 March 2015 there were over 106,000 primary Temporary Work (Skilled) (subclass 457) visa holders in Australia;

(b) 31 December 2014 there were over 160,000 Working Holiday (subclass 417) and Work and Holiday (subclass 462) visa holders in Australia; and

(c) 30 June 2014 there were an estimated 62,100 unlawful non-citizens in Australia;

(2) further notes that:

(a) in August 2015 there were around 780,000 Australians who were unemployed and that 280,000 of those were aged 15 to 24; and

(b) the Senate is currently conducting an inquiry, the completion date of which was recently extended to February 2016, into the impact of Australia's temporary work visa programs on the Australian labour market and on the temporary work visa holders;

(3) ensures that genuine labour market testing be applied to temporary work visas; and

(4) calls on the Government to ensure that the Department of Immigration and Border Protection has sufficient resources to properly ensure compliance with Australian visa conditions.

Five minutes does not give me time to do this motion justice, but I will certainly try to summarise the issues which I want to raise in the five minutes that I have. Currently, we have an unemployment rate of 6.2 per cent in Australia, or, in real numbers, some 780,000 Australians are unemployed. Over one-third of those are young people. At the same time, at any one time we have over 700,000 people in this country on some kind of visa which enables them to work within Australia. As at 31 March this year, there were 106,000 people on 457 skilled worker visas. As at 31 December last year, there were 160,000 working holiday visa entrants. As at 31 December last year, there were 300,000 student visa entrants in this country, and only two months before that the figure was 400,000. We have 60,000 illegal migrants in this country at any one time, and then we also have the seasonal workers who come and go at various times of the year. Indeed, there are one million-plus people in this country on some kind of visa about whom we do not have a clear understanding as to whether they are also taking up jobs in one way or another.

The matters that I raise bring me to several concerns that I have about the visa program in this country. It is clear that Australian jobs are being taken up by overseas workers. In particular, young people in this country are missing out because those jobs are quite often going to other young people who are coming into the country on either working holiday visas or student visas. In turn, young people in Australia are missing out on the job experience that they would otherwise get and perhaps the doorway to a career further down the track. What is also clear to me is that parents of those young people are incredibly frustrated and, indeed, anxious at the fact that their children cannot get jobs whilst overseas entrants are filling those jobs. Only on Saturday, I had a parent speak to me at length about that very matter.

My second concern relates to the exploitation of labour by rackets that are occurring in this country. We saw recently the exposure of the 7-Eleven stores debacle, where people were clearly being underpaid and overworked by an organisation that was deliberately distorting and abusing the visa system in this country. That particular matter has a long way to go and I am sure that we will hear much more about it in the future, but what is clear to me is that, at the moment, because of the visa laws in this country, there are opportunities for people, whether they are agents or employers, to exploit overseas workers and employ them ahead of Australians. Indeed, it is alleged that one out of every five 457 visa holders is not even doing the job that they were brought in for or that they are not being paid correctly.

The other matter that I am very concerned with is that this whole issue of bringing in foreign labour is leading to the driving down of Australian wages and conditions. Australians living in this country have to live in Australia and pay for Australian costs of living. They have mortgages to pay and they have families to support, and they will be forced, if it means saving their job, to accept lower standards of wages and conditions in order to continue to be able to provide for their families. That is not the direction that we should be taking in this country.

We also have illegal stayers here, some 60,000 of them. We do not know what they are doing, but I suspect most of them are employed somewhere, cash in hand, doing some work that could otherwise be done by an Australian. But, again, we do not seem to do much about that—and perhaps it is because the Department of Immigration and Border Protection is not well enough resourced to manage that issue. Then we have a government that is prepared to add to that pressure by creating free trade agreements that allow foreign workers to come in, by giving an additional 5,000 places to young Chinese to come in and work for 12 months, by changing shipping legislation to outsource work to foreign workers and by awarding contracts to overseas companies.

I know what the coalition members will say—that the figures were much higher when Labor was in office. The truth is: Labor acknowledged that and brought in labour market testing, and we also started to clamp down on some of the rorts that we saw happening at the time, not to mention that the economy was much stronger when Labor were in office than it is right now.

The concerns I raise are serious and they are something that the government should be addressing. The coalition should stop allowing the visa system in Australia to be exploited and used to fill Australian jobs with overseas labour when there are Australians who could otherwise do the work.

Craig Kelly (Hughes, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Is the motion seconded?

Maria Vamvakinou (Calwell, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I second the motion and reserve my right to speak.

Ewen Jones (Herbert, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

First and foremost, I acknowledge the member for Makin and his rightful concern about youth unemployment, senior unemployment and underemployment in this country, but I do not think the temporary employment visa is the sole issue here. In my city of Townsville, we do not have a lot of temporary employment visa holders, but in my region of North Queensland it is a rite of passage for a lot of international backpackers to come to work at Bowen with the small crops of beans, tomatoes, rockmelons, honeydew melons and strawberries, and around the Burdekin with pumpkins, rockmelons and, of course, mangoes. The backpackers come up the highway, stay in hostels and pick up a bit of cash in Australian working conditions with Australian award wages. In fact, employers are paying superannuation for these foreign workers, who will not get it back until they leave the country. For me, it is a valuable part and a value-adding proposition for these people to come through our country.

I say the member to Makin that I looked through the six years while Labor were in government and I did not see one speech that he made that was critical of his own government, the number of visas handed out and the way the system was working whilst they were in government. It is very easy to sit in opposition and throw spears, but when you are part of the system it is much harder to fix it.

What I see as the real concern about temporary work visas is the Centrelink system, which makes it awfully hard for people to transition into seasonal work. The member for Makin and the member for Wakefield, who is also in the chamber, are from South Australia, where seasonal workers pick grapes and so on.

What we see in North Queensland is that, for people who are youth unemployed and all that sort of thing, to be able to transition out for a short period of time and then get back into the system can often be frustrating. It is time consuming. It is difficult to transition out of unemployment, take those temporary roles and transition back. There are often time lags there, and quite often you will find that there will be small debts accrued through Centrelink that they then have to pay back out of their benefits. So, if you do not make it easy for people to transition through these things and then transition out, you make it awfully hard for Australian people to take these jobs when someone comes through and there are ads going up for people to do this sort of work where they can just jump straight in and have a go.

I often worry about some of the things—we have the Green Army—that we are trying to do here, trying to give people resilience. It is not easy there. In North Queensland, we just saw Glencore on the weekend announce a further 535 jobs being cut at Mount Isa. It is the cyclical nature of resource prices, and that sort of thing. It further adds to the employment issues around my area.

Blaming foreign workers is an easy thing to do, and pointing the finger at other people for the things we are doing in our own systems is an easy thing to do. What we have to do is make it as easy as possible for people to get a job. It is not about wages. For me it has never been about wages There was the Kelly review in 1908-09, which said that, for the profitability of the company, it did not matter what the wages were. We made a decision in the early 1900s that we are going to be a high-wage nation. You could be a high-wage nation if you have serious low input costs and high productivity. What we must do is make sure that they stay there. We must make sure that, if we are going to pay penalty rates and we are going to pay all this stuff here, we are earning them. Above all else, we must make sure that we reduce the red tape that is floating around these things and makes it hard for people to get a job, and that we make it as easy as possible to transition in and out of seasonal work.

A place like Bowen is a fantastic place to live your life. It is a fantastic place to raise your children, but it is hard to get full-time quality work. When you are faced with those things you must look at other things there, and seasonal work is one of those things. It is the same as the haul-out drivers when we are harvesting cane. It is a transition thing there, but quite often friends of mine who have done it, when they have a wife and three kids and that sort of thing and they are unemployed when they are not hauling out, end up at the end of the financial year with a problem with Centrelink, and we must make that easier.

Maria Vamvakinou (Calwell, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am very pleased to be speaking on and indeed seconding the motion from the member for Makin. He and I have been members of the Joint Standing Committee on Migration in the last two parliaments. We have been involved in three inquiries: an inquiry into multiculturalism and the benefits of migration, an inquiry into the business investment visas and currently the inquiry into the seasonal workers program. All three inquiries have repeatedly raised concerns regarding the nature, implementation, impact and level of scrutiny of Australia's temporary working visas program. Anecdotal evidence suggests that rorts, manipulation of the visa system and exploitation by employers exist and are going unchecked, as is the possibility of an oversupply of working visas. Because there is a lack of comprehensive information, research and review into how the temporary work and skilled visa categories intersect in the Australian job market, we do not know the extent of the impact they are having on job prospects and opportunities for Australians.

This motion calls for genuine and stringent labour market testing and adequate research and review of temporary working visas. It also calls for the government to ensure sufficient resources are made available so that temporary working visa conditions are complied with and met in order to mitigate possible rorts and adverse impacts, such as undermining of work pay and conditions for both temporary workers and local people, as well as mitigating an oversupply that could disadvantage local workers.

What information we have to date in relation to these issues unfortunately is anecdotal and episodic. A report on the misuse of the 457 visas in the building industry conducted by the CFMEU sounded alarm bells some time ago. More recently we saw the ABC Four Corners program on the 7-Eleven 457 visa workers scandal. Rorts are real and organised, although we do not fully know to what extent and to what level. So information is essential given that in August 2015 there were 780,000 Australians unemployed, and 280,000 of them were aged between 15 and 24.

There is a growing anxiety amongst Australians about employment opportunities and prospects. The value of a job to the quality of an individual's life is immeasurable. Their capacity to learn and better themselves to contribute to their community makes for a more rounded, healthier, productive individual and an inclusive society. In all, a job is good for the individual, good for the community and good for the country.

Parts of my electorate have rates of youth unemployment as high as 26 per cent. Calwell also has a high rate of mature-aged unemployed and low-skilled workers. Manufacturing has taken a savage hit in recent years. Thousands of jobs have gone, especially in the car-manufacturing industry, with the closure of the Ford Motor Company being one of our biggest losses. Calwell has the largest intake of residents who have come here under the refugee and humanitarian program, predominantly from Iraq. Many of them are educated and skilled. They cannot get jobs because we do not recognise their previous work experience and it is often too difficult, if not impossible, to obtain recognition of their qualifications and skills. Yet, paradoxically, they have maths, science and engineering backgrounds—areas that are always highlighted as areas of skills shortages here in Australia.

Many job seekers I speak to, especially young people, tell me that it is becoming increasingly difficult for them to find work, especially those who are seeking part-time work, because, as they tell me, employers who do not want to pay award wages are bypassing Australian job seekers in favour of 457s, international students and backpackers, because they can pay them much less. I understand the impact that globalisation has had and is having on labour markets and I also support foreign investment. I also understand that skills shortages are a reality here in Australia and we need to address them for the sake of our growth and development.

The government and the opposition are both keen to invest in skilling Australians and supporting them in finding jobs. This applies to the young, the old and the disabled alike. We want Australians who can work to work. We have to, however, make sure that there are jobs available for them, across all ages, circumstances and skill levels.

We face many challenges in creating new jobs as we lose our traditional employment sectors and shed old jobs. So we need to know what impact the 106,000 457 visa holders or the 160,000 Work and Holiday visa holders are actually having and whether they are in fact addressing genuine skills shortages. We need to act on allegations that rorting is rife in the current system, where supply chains involving unscrupulous employers, registered training organisations, job providers, migration agents and labour hire companies are making it increasingly difficult for Australians to enter and remain in the workforce, whilst exploiting temporary work visa holders.

Craig Kelly (Hughes, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am pleased to rise to speak on this motion because the underlying premise of it reminds me of a South Park episode called 'Goobacks' where people from the future travel back in time and take everyone's jobs, and they all run around going, 'They took our jobs! They took our jobs!' That is the underlying premise of this motion, and it shows why those who sit on that side of the chamber are completely unfit for office. They continually argue and they think that our economy is a zero sum game where one person takes another person's job, when they should be trying to concentrate on how to grow the economic pie and to create more jobs in the economy as this coalition has done, creating 335,000 new jobs since we have come to office.

In the last couple of weeks, while we have been away from parliament, I have attended several citizenship ceremonies—one with the good member for Werriwa who is sitting in the chamber at the moment—and there in front of us we saw hundreds of people taking the pledge to become Australian citizens. Amongst them, we saw builders, architects, tradesmen, doctors, medical researchers and specialists, educators, mechanics, business people and entrepreneurs. The underlying premise of this motion is that, when these people come into Australia and start work, they take someone's job. That is the message that the opposition are sending through this motion.

But what actually happens when people come in from overseas is this. Firstly, they create extra demand, because they have a demand for housing—for accommodation—for food and for entertainment, and that demand creates more jobs. Secondly, the value-adding activities that they engage in drive innovation in our economy, and that in itself creates more demand and creates more jobs. So, as to this nonsense, we cannot stand here in this parliament and have these xenophobic speeches saying, 'The foreigners are coming in and they are all taking our jobs.'

The 457 visa program is an important component of our economy that allows companies to employ people from overseas where we have labour shortages. The employment conditions are exactly the same as those we have currently for all Australian workers. But, instead, we see these gold-medal-winning hypocritical statements, led by the trade union movement, who themselves are regular users of the 457 visa scheme. Only the other month it was disclosed that the trade union movement had sponsored 41 subclass 457 visas—

Nick Champion (Wakefield, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Forty-one?

Craig Kelly (Hughes, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Yes, 41. You had some from the Australian Education Union; the Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees Association; the good old United Voice; the Australian Services Union; the Finance Sector Union; the Maritime Union; the National Tertiary Education Union and the Transport Workers Union—all those unions went out and employed 457 visa workers, and yet the very same people that they employed on 457 visas are now writing the scripts and doing the copy-writing work to attack the 457 program. What absolute hypocrisy!

Another thing: during the sitting break we had for the last three weeks in parliament, I was down here on Friday for one of the committee hearings and we finished early. I took the opportunity to go and visit Old Parliament House, which is something I had not had the opportunity to do—and I would recommend to anyone who has not yet done so to go through Old Parliament House. There was a statement there, a quote from the former Prime Minister Stanley Bruce, from 9 May 1927 when opening the old provisional House, and he said: 'May those who enter this open door govern with justice, reason and equal favour to all. May they do so in humility and without self-interest. May they think and act nationally. May they speak with the voice of those who sent them here—the voice of the people.'

That is the whole problem for those on the other side of the chamber: the people who sent them there are the trade union leaders, and they do not speak with the voice of the people; they speak with the voice of the trade union movement. And that is why we have this xenophobic campaign against the China free trade agreement, backed up by this shameful motion that pretends there is some zero sum game.

The 457 visas are an important part of our economy. When foreign workers come to this country they add to the supply, they add to the demand, they make our country a richer country, and they help to create more jobs in this economy.

Russell Broadbent (McMillan, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

You are not listed here, but I will call you, Member for Wakefield.

Nick Champion (Wakefield, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker, for giving me the call. I wish I could say it was a pleasure following the member for Hughes, but he exhibits such startling incoherence that it is hard to say that it is a pleasure. Part of that startling incoherence is that he confuses skilled migration and citizenship on the one hand with a guest worker scheme on the other. And that is what the 457 scheme has degenerated into under this government: it is becoming very close to a guest worker scheme. This is completely against the Australian character and the Australian way, which is to have a fair go—not just a fair go for workers and for the unemployed in this country, but also a fair go for those who come to our country to work. I would prefer that they came here and took out citizenship and lived here, because, whenever a visa is hung over someone's head, they are vulnerable to abuse, and we are beginning to see example after example after example of this. And no matter how much the member for Hughes wants to talk about xenophobia and racism and all this other nonsense and to talk about South Parkand he has probably never watched an episode of South Park in his life; it was probably his staff. But his speeches are sort of Southpark-esque in their ridiculousness.

I encourage him to do a bit of research. He should go and have a look at the Senate Education and Employment References Committee inquiry into Australia's temporary work visa programs. On 19 June 2015 the committee heard from a Mrs Alferaz, a nurse who had to pay between $2,000 and $3,000 to a nursing agency to get her visa. This was not a fee listed in the legislation or the regulations of this parliament but a fee that that agency charged her to get a visa—that is, the right to work in Australia. She was coming here from the Philippines and she was charged to get the visa. That is a racket. When she got here her experience was that she was underpaid under the enterprise bargaining agreement. She was wrongly classified and underpaid by some $57,000. Does that sound like a fair go to anybody in this room or anybody sitting outside of it? Of course it does not. It exhibits a scheme that is open to abuse and where abuse is rampant.

There are all sorts of examples of workers from overseas, from situations where they are vulnerable to exploitation, being charged from the outset for their visa. When they get here they are underpaid or are charged exorbitant and exploitative rates for their accommodation or their travel to the workplace. The visa is held over their head in the workplace to get them to accept these conditions. That is what is happening. There is example after example of it, not just with 457 visas but with student visas and backpacker visas. This image that is conjured up of some European backpacker happily working picking apricots is a nonsense. What is actually happening is that people are being trafficked here, exploited and becoming a sort of ghost workforce in the system. They are having their visas held over their head the whole time, and if they go to the authorities, the Fair Work Ombudsman or the press they will get their visa taken from them and will be back home.

There is a growing scandal in this country around visa classifications, and it is not to this government's benefit to deny it. If the government had any sense at all it would be cracking down on this, because the very integrity of the immigration system is at stake. We cannot have a situation where workers who are coming here from the developing world, who are vulnerable to exploitation, are used by Australians and Australian businesses as some sort of ghost, black workforce. It is not acceptable. We have seen it in Baiada Poultry, we have seen it in Australia Post and we have seen it in 7-Eleven. We have seen it all over Australia. (Time expired)

George Christensen (Dawson, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I have no doubt that there are cases, as the previous member said, where there has been exploitation. I have absolutely no doubt and have known of some of those examples myself. But to claim that Australian businesses and the majority of people who are engaged in this are conducting themselves in this illegal manner and exploiting these people is beyond the pale. It does happen in some instances, just as in some instances Australian workers are exploited as well. And there are appropriate mechanisms whereby the bosses, the employers, can be pulled up. There is the fair work agency, there is the department of immigration and there are quite a number of different not-for-profit agencies out there.

Let us have a look at some of the figures. The reality is that we have a motion before us talking about numbers—numbers of people who are in the country working under various visa systems, whether they be 457s or backpacker visas. The number of 457 visas for overseas workers actually increased by many times under Labor, from roughly 60,000 in 2010 to over 110,000 in 2013. Now let us have a look at what has actually happened and what the statistics say. There are fewer 457 visa workers in the country now than there were under Labor, so it is not some sort of crisis. These problems that the honourable member talked about were problems that existed under the previous government in a minority of cases, and unfortunately they are problems that will always exist where there are some bad eggs in the system. That is why we have policing of the system. For all the huff and puff that we hear from the CFMEU and all the other unions, in the Mackay region there has been a 20 per cent decrease in the number of 457 visa workers. So it is not in any way some sort of crisis that has been created under this government. The issue was more manifold under the last government.

I can say that the coalition has done more to stamp out the illegal use of 417 visa holders than any other government in history. That includes the last Labor government, which did nothing about the situation. We have established Taskforce Cadena, which has led to quite a number of arrests of those people who are doing the wrong thing. We have set up the Australian Border Force, an organisation which is specifically looking at illegal overstayers and all of these sorts of matters. It is fair to say that this is something the opposition leader did not even know existed or what it purpose was, even though he voted on it and had extensive briefings on it. He also criticised an operation that they had down in Melbourne, where they were going to look at taxi drivers—an area where there have been widespread reports of foreign workers illegally operating. It was portrayed in the media as people being randomly approached in the street. That was never what it was going to be, but it came under attack by the Labor Party.

You cannot have it both ways. If there is a policing mechanism to deal with these issues that you are talking about and you come out and criticise that, you then want it both ways. You criticise the policing of it, but then you come in here and say that we are not policing it enough. What do you want? I wish the Labor Party would stand up and tell us exactly what they want here. Do they want the 457 visa system ended? No answer. Do they want the 417 visa system ended? No answer. But you get up here and make statements as if that is what you want, as if these things should be crushed, destroyed and forever buried. That would be a disaster for our economy, and you know it, and that is why you get up here with these lily-livered words about how bad it is and how terrible it is.

But are we going to do anything about it? No, we are not. We are not going to do a single thing about it, because this is all for political power plays, and it is absolutely ridiculous and disgraceful that you are doing that on the back of foreign workers. The government's policy about ChAFTA is this: we will only enter into a project labour agreement where we have been satisfied that Australians have been provided first opportunity for jobs— (Time expired)

Laurie Ferguson (Werriwa, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

We will just start with a bit of history. The member for Hughes quoted some fine words from former conservative Prime Minister Stanley Bruce, which he read the other week. I would remind that member, when we are trying to picture this side of politics as racist and xenophobic, that Prime Minister Bruce tried to expel some people from this country on the basis of their ethnicity and their nationality. They were not Muslims; they were not Mexicans; they were New Zealanders, and one of them, Heffron, was to become a Premier of New South Wales. So that is a bit of history for the member for Hughes.

The previous speaker thought he was making a big concession in saying that there were some instances of abuse. He reassured us that it was not the majority and that it was a small problem. But in the real world we note that Monash University recently did a survey of foreign language newspaper advertisements in this country—not in Vienna, not in Berlin, but in Australia—and it found that 80 per cent of those advertisements for employees in foreign language papers in this country had wage offers below the legal limit. Similarly, The Sydney Morning Herald on 1 October did a survey of the Mandarin press in this country and found rates of $10 to $13, well below the minimum rate of $17.29. It also noted the real world, daily practice of intimidation of these workers and the threat of their visas being cancelled if they did not agree to hours and hours of overtime and low levels of wages. The website yeeyi.com, which essentially aims at Australian Chinese visitors, people who are on either student visas or temporary work visas, noted that wages as low as $4 an hour were being offered.

These people say this is no threat to Australian workers, we should not worry, there is no problem. There might be a few philanthropists out there, but there would be far more employers in this country who would be willing to take somebody for $4 an hour than pay the Australian legal minimum wage. The situation is that we have an unemployment rate of 6.2 per cent. The previous speaker talks about how many new jobs they have created. They do not talk about the mass losses of jobs in this country nor do they talk about the growth of the overall labour force and the fact that unemployment is now 6.2 per cent and that over eight per cent of Australians when surveyed said, 'Yes, I do get 20 hours a week. Yes, I do get eight hours a week work. But I'd rather work longer.' Roughly 14 per cent of the workforce are either unemployed or underemployed—and they say we have got to do this for the grape growers and the orange growers around the country.

The previous speaker on this side politics articulated the reality. We have seen it with Australia Post, a once-respected national government employer. We have seen it with Baiada Poultry. It has been witnessed in the large sectors of mass factory employment. It still exists in this country under this government. That is where it is happening. A few people in remote agricultural areas is not where it is needed. Of course, 7-Eleven was the most recent case. A multimillionaire has established his wealth through a business plan which requires his franchisees to then exploit their workers. There is no way the franchisees can avoid this. They get the students in, they know the students are only allowed to work 20 hours a week or in holiday periods, they have them working far more hours than that and then, after exploiting them, they threaten them and demand more hours of work out of them for the same rate of pay and then they say, 'If you say boo about this we'll go to the immigration department and get you kicked out of the country.' What temporary workers are going to be able to resist that kind of threat? That is what we are talking about.

The previous speaker says, 'Yes, there's an occasional instance of this. We've heard about it.' He and the member for Herbert from the Liberal National Party should go on a trip with the member for Hinkler, who is from their own part of Australia and from their own political party. He has had the guts to go on national TV and expose this kind of extortion: the attempt to sexually exploit women and the underpayment of people in their parts of this country. He is on their side of politics. He has been on national TV on two occasions.

We have a situation where there are now 160,000 primary temporary work (skilled) visas in this country, 160,000 working holiday workers. The other problem we have got here is that that is a large number of people. When they talk about policing it and doing something about it, the reality is that they are not interested in doing anything about it because they actually believe in this. They believe it is a way to discipline the workforce, to reduce Australian workers' wages. They are not interested in having a worthwhile, sizeable unit inside the immigration department to do anything about this. They are too interested in defending the undermining of Australian conditions because they have got some idea that will progress if we do that.

Eric Hutchinson (Lyons, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I was not exactly sure what the motivation for this motion originally was, but it is becoming abundantly clear. What I have learned in the short time that I have been in this parliament is that you judge those on the other side not by what they say but by what they do, and their actions in government bear no resemblance at all to what they say now in opposition. They claim this is about 417s, and it was, as was highlighted by the member for Dawson. Of course there are instances where misuse of 417, 462 and 457 visa categories should be called out. That should be brought before the law because under Australian law that sort of behaviour is illegal and will be prosecuted. When we came to government we were made aware that there were issues with some of these visa schemes, and we made it our business to conduct an inquiry into them. It was a very deep and far-reaching inquiry. It was found that there are circumstances in which this occurs, and those people behaving inappropriately under those visa schemes will be—and rightly should be—prosecuted.

The hypocrisy of those opposite, when the number of 457 visas ballooned under the previous government. In 2010 there were 68,000 457 visas. By September 2013, at the time of the GFC, the labour market was declining, apparently, and we had to throw money here, there and everywhere at pink batts, school halls and whatever else it was. The number of 457 visas grew to 110,000 by September 2013. That number has now reduced, in a labour market that has expanded. In relation to the hypocrisy and the comments of those on the other side, the only thing I can really think of is xenophobia.

Can I speak specifically about my electorate of Lyons in Tasmania and the importance of the 417 visa category, particularly to the fruit growing sector—be that strawberries, raspberries or cherries—for a short period of the year, from December through until February. Businesses in my electorate like Burlington Berries, Costa's and Tim Reid's in the Derwent Valley very much depend on these visas. They need to pick the fruit when it is ready to be picked, and if they cannot source all the local labour that they need, they use 417 visa workers to do that. As we are opening up markets under the free trade—

Debate adjourned.