Stephen Jones (Throsby, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Regional Development and Infrastructure) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

When you live in regional Australia, you understand the critical importance of the three things that make a difference between a good life—a life of happiness; and the alternative—a life of misery. Those three things are decent jobs—secure jobs, well-paid jobs—a decent health care system and a decent education system. These have to be our No. 1 priority. That is why it is deeply concerning that this government seems indifferent to the plight of workers who daily see their jobs being lost, often overseas or by overseas workers coming to Australia.

As the parliamentary year starts, I want to remind this government and this Prime Minister that we will not rest until it puts Australian jobs first, and local workers at the front of the queue when it comes to those Australian jobs. Can we, this year, end the madness where Australian workers are woken up in the middle of the night, dragged off a ship, only to be replaced by a foreign crew being paid a fraction of the worker's pay that they were earning? Can we end the madness where government workers are having their jobs offshored and the federal government is seriously putting out expressions of interest on how they can copy other jurisdictions about offshoring Commonwealth government work? This is happening now. Even locally we are seeing the madness where you have highly-skilled workers who are, regrettably, losing their jobs in industries such as manufacturing being looked over. And you have got companies who are doing contracts for the National Broadband Network, shipping in workers to the Illawarra from other regions—from as far away as Queensland and Western Australia—to do the very work that could be done by skilled, local workers. Can we end this madness, Deputy Speaker Kelly?

We know that the Illawarra and the Southern Highlands are resilient regions. They are going through economic change. When you live in a region which is built around a port, you know that your future is intrinsically linked to the rest of the world. But looking to the future and the rest of the world does not mean you close your eyes to the jobs and the needs of your region today. We know that the traditional industries of manufacturing, agriculture and mining have given way to the service industries as the major employers, but they are still critical to the local economy. Government has a role in the transition.

I turn to the National Broadband Network, because fast, reliable broadband is crucial for business—and I know those over on the other side of the chamber, who are interjecting now, do not understand the importance of the National Broadband Network. They railed and campaigned against it, but in the Illawarra and the Southern Highlands, we know it is critical to small business and it is critical to households. I know this, because last year I surveyed my electorate and asked them to tell me about the problems that they were having with telecommunications and broadband. Many of them were telling me that after 3 pm in the afternoon, their broadband crashed and slowed to a crawl. They are telling me that they cannot start their small home based businesses, because they do not have access to an ADSL port.

If we are going to transition the economy of regional areas such as those which I represent and ensure that they have a foot in the new economies and the jobs of the future, then the NBN has to be critical to this. I am committed to doing everything that we can to ensure that my region enjoys the benefits of a future economy, but that does not mean—and this is a point that we need to ram home to this Prime Minister—that we give up on the jobs of the current workers. Last year before we went away for Christmas and before the parliament adjourned, we had massive debates about the role of the Commonwealth government in ensuring that we continued to have a steel industry in this country.

I welcome the industry minister to come to the Illawarra—a place he did not even know where it existed. He could not tell you where Port Kembla was on the map. I invited him to come to the Illawarra and visit the steelworks, talk to the workers who were losing their jobs—workers who were hoping to transition to new jobs in other industries. It has been months since this invitation was issued, and the Minister for Industry, Innovation and Science has still not been able to find his way to the Illawarra. I invite him to come down to the Illawarra, listen to the workers whose livelihoods are being threatened, listen to the workers who are seeing their jobs offshored and seeing their jobs replaced by foreign workers on foreign crews so that he can put in place the policies that we need in my region.

Michael Sukkar (Deakin, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Commonwealth government has a number of obvious roles that we are responsible for. But as a local member one issue that is constantly raised with me and is at the forefront of my mind at all times is community safety. It is often said that there is no greater obligation on government than to maintain the good law and order for our citizens to allow them to go about their daily lives in safety and in security. This year, I have spent a lot of time since coming back from a great summer break speaking to my electorate, and time and time again the issue of personal safety arises, particularly personal safety for women going about their business. We have seen in Victoria some absolutely disgusting examples of recidivist criminals, who are—and in no surprise to the community—people who have a track record that is an abomination. Time and time again, they are released back onto our streets to cause mayhem, harm and, ultimately, tragedy to the lives of decent families.

As the member for Deakin, one of the areas that I have constantly spoken about and championed—I have spoken to our state government on, written to our state government on, cajoled our state government on and fought our state government on—is to absolutely review and reform our sentencing guidelines of, in fact, the entire judicial system as it relates to crimes against women and children, and, indeed, any serious crimes. Time and time again, I have people speak to me about changing the way that they go about their lives to accommodate for those feelings of a lack of safety. So that may be a woman who gets the earlier train home because she does not want to walk from the station to home in the dark. As a society, we should never accept or allow for people to have to change the way they go about their lives in order to accommodate people who are allowed on the street—and I will not name them because many of these cases are before the courts at the moment—who have committed crime after crime and who have not been sentenced correctly.

One of the things that I have asked of the Victorian state Attorney-General is to undertake a detailed review into changing our sentencing laws from concurrent to cumulative sentencing. In short, if you are convicted of three crimes at the moment and you are imprisoned then you are in prison for the single crime that has the highest penalty. We should have cumulative crimes where, if you are found guilty of three crimes, each sentence that applies to those three crimes cumulatively adds to your time in jail. In many of the cases that I have looked at, if those criminals had been behind bars for the true amount of time that they should have been, they would not have been on the street and the tragic circumstances of rape, death and mayhem would not have been there.

Broader than that, though, of course, is our obligation to the safety to not just individual citizens but our entire nation. I am very, very proud that last year, through the Crimes Legislation Amendment (Powers, Offences and Other Measures) Bill and the Proceeds of Crime Act, we have been very keen as a government to look at what levers the federal government can pull in order to ensure that we have the strictest possible regime for criminal offences in this country.

Of course, due to our constitutional arrangements the states take primary responsibility for our justice system, so the Commonwealth government is limited in the extent to which it can impact on these changes. I am comfortable—in fact, I am very proud—that this government has done absolutely everything within our purview and within our power to make sure that our criminal laws are as strict as they possibly can be. I am calling on the Victorian state government—indeed, I am calling on every single state government in this country—to say that enough is enough. Enough is enough of us seeing these outrageous criminals who are not sentenced correctly continually undertaking these crimes. We need to reform our— (Time expired)