Shayne Neumann (Blair, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I'm pleased to speak on the Migration Amendment (Strengthening Sponsorship and Nomination Processes) Bill 2024. The Albanese Labor government is committed to fixing Australia's broken migration system and continuing to clean up the shocking mess left by the former coalition government in this space. We inherited a migration system that was broken, exposed to exploitation and not prepared for the reopening of the borders post COVID-19. Dr Martin Parkinson, who led the first independent review of migration in a generation, found that it was a deliberate decision to neglect the system, and that it was so badly broken that it required a 10-year rebuild.

The government's migration strategy, released last year in response to Dr Parkinson's review, builds a system that Australians can trust, helping us to get the skills we need while halving the migration intake. The strategy is a set of commitments to address a decade of neglect in Australia's visa system and support a more prosperous, fair and secure Australian labour market. If you are a worker, whether a local or a migrant, the migration strategy means stronger protections not only in terms of your wages and conditions but in the workplace as well. For businesses, it means getting the workers and skills you need to grow and be more productive.

This bill implements key commitments from the migration strategy. It amends the Migration Act 1958 to establish a legislative framework and a new approach to temporary skill migration in Australia in the form of a new skills in demand visa, which targets the skills Australia needs and promotes greater worker mobility. This is an important step in delivering a better-planned migration system, meeting Australia's skills needs and laying a strong foundation for the future. The legislation creates the income thresholds in indexation for the proposed streams of that visa. As well as streamlining labour market testing requirements. The bill will help secure the integrity of the skilled migration program by setting minimum income thresholds for temporary skilled migrants in the act and by legislating annual indexation of these income thresholds. It establishes a legislative basis to create a public register of approved sponsors, and provides that labour market testing be completed within six months—increased from four months—prior to the sponsor of a skilled migrant worker lodging a nomination.

I will go through these measures in detail. First, a key recommendation in the migration strategy was to develop a new skills in demand visa with full mobility and clear pathways to permanent residence. The new skills in demand visa is due to be implemented in December 2024.

There are three pathways. First, there is a specialist skills pathway that will attract high-skilled specialists to ensure Australia can quickly and easily recruit top talent. This will be open to migrants who earn more than $135,000 in any occupation per annum. The specialist skills stream will recognise these workers meet a national need that is beyond filling a narrowly defined gap in the labour market. Highly skilled migrants bring significant economic benefits. They are more likely to bring productivity-enhancing knowledge and ideas, and to create jobs for locals.

Second, a core skills pathway will help meet Australia's skills needs, and most temporary skilled migrants will come through that stream. This stream is designed to bring in skilled employees Australia needs now and in the future, to ensure we are able to provide ourselves with the goods and services we need to support our way of life. Applicants will need to have an occupation on the occupation list compiled by Jobs and Skills Australia and earn more than the current temporary skilled migration income threshold—commonly known as TSMIT—which was set at $73,150 as of 1 July this year. In addition to this, TSMIT will be renamed 'core skills income threshold'.

Third, there'll be an essential skills pathway which will support the migration of low-pay—that is, below TSMIT—workers with essential skills. The policy settings for this stream are still to be developed, and further announcements will be made in due course.

On the indexation of thresholds, the bill legislates the income thresholds for the specialist skills and core skills streams of the Skills in Demand visa and legislates that they're indexed annually in line with local Australian wages. Indexing these income thresholds is an important part of maintaining the integrity of the Migration Program over time, ensuring the temporary skills program remains targeted towards more highly skilled migrants and supporting the wages of migrants and Australians.

The provision of legislated minimum income thresholds for the streams in the Skills in Demand visa will ensure that people working on those visas are less vulnerable to exploitation. This will guarantee that migrant wages will increase alongside Australian wages and ensure Australian workers, and workers generally, receive fair remuneration through indexed salary thresholds. Indexing these thresholds is critical to protecting wages and conditions for local workers, something that the coalition was never capable of doing nor had the policy intent to do.

This is good for all workers, regardless of where they're from. This is about making sure the skilled migration system does what it says it does and helps us to maintain a social licence for our skilled migration program. It will put some downward pressure on net overseas migration.

Currently, indexation of the TSMIT needs to be done by amending regulations every year, something the coalition refused to do. Legislating the indexation in this way will mean the income thresholds always remain in line with Australian wages, and placing such a threshold in the act and making it subject to annual indexation, instead of continuing to specify it in a legislative instrument made by the minister, will provide greater certainty both for sponsors and for workers going forward while providing greater strength to restore integrity in the migration system.

For a long time, Labor called for indexation of these important salary thresholds. For too long, under the coalition these salaries were not indexed, and the TSMIT remained at $53,900 per annum from 1 July 2013 to 30 June 2023. Get that, Mr Deputy Speaker Young—for nearly 10 years the TSMIT remained the same. That has had the impact of driving down wages. Should I say that the former finance minister Mathias Cormann said that driving down wages was a deliberate design feature of the coalitions coalition's industrial policy? It is a key measure that they undertook to drive down wages in the workplaces of Australians.

When I was a shadow minister for immigration and border protection, we called for indexation of these important salary thresholds in the lead-up to the 2019 election. Again, in 2022, Labor had a commitment to raise the TSMIT, the minimum amount a migrant must be paid to be eligible for temporary skilled migration. At neither election did the LNP government, federally, support that. Given the opportunity, knowing Labor was prepared to do that, on neither occasion did they take the opportunity to be bipartisan and to lift the wages and conditions of Australians.

On 1 July 2023, we delivered on our promise, with the TSMIT increasing from $53,900 to $70,000, and it will be indexed to $73,150 from 1 July 2024 this year. Contrast that with those opposite. It was stagnant for nearly a decade, despite the fact that the now Leader of the Opposition commissioned a review into this income threshold before those two elections in 2019 and 2022 that I referred to. In 2017 the Leader of the Opposition commissioned a review of the TSMIT—two years before the 2019 election, when he was the Minister for Home Affairs, which recommended that review. It recommended it be indexed annually. But in 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021 and 2022 they did not do it—at no stage, given the opportunity. They went from 2013 to 2017 without a review—nothing. Even though they were told to do it, they didn't do it. They completely ignored the recommendation. They had absolutely no interest in getting wages moving and no interest in managing the migration system properly by listening to that review, which they commissioned themselves.

In terms of streamlining labour market testing, the bill will make amendments to the Migration Act to make labour market testing valid for six months, up from four months, providing flexibility to businesses to meet their skills needs and labour market testing requirements while still being required to attempt to fill a position locally—local workers given a chance before a migrant worker is sponsored.

Finally, the bill supports greater transparency in the skilled migration system and supports the government's attempt to enable mobility for migrant workers. To enhance worker mobility and tackle temporary skilled migrant worker exploitation, in the Migration Strategy there was a commitment to establish a legislative framework to underpin a public register of approved worker sponsors. This is a list of businesses approved by the Department of Home Affairs to sponsor migrant workers. The public register will include the names of approved sponsors, the postcode associated with the approved sponsor's ABN, and the number of sponsored workers and their occupations. The register will assist with mobility by helping temporary skilled migrant workers to find a new sponsor if they wish to change jobs. That register will encourage transparency and is a resource for temporary skilled migrant workers to check that their sponsoring employer is legitimate and doing the right thing.

Again and again, whether it was in Ipswich, the Lockyer Valley or any part of South-East Queensland, or in regional Victoria, regional New South Wales or WA, when I was the shadow minister I recall meeting workers who were exploited during this time. Those opposite could have done this, they should have done this, but they failed to do this. It has taken a Labor government to do it.

There was a report by a parliamentary committee that looked at abuses in the migration area. There were strong recommendations in this area. It didn't take a report commissioned by the minister. There were ample reports about exploitation in this area, with recommendations which those opposite refused to take up. They refused to act on the exploitation of workers in the agricultural sector, in the mining sector, in retail and hospitality, in aged care and in child care. They refused to do it. They never acted on it.

If we include a postcode in the register of approved sponsors, it will enable migrants searching for mobility to identify employers nearby and it will increase the practicality of the register. This will provide greater protections and oversight transparency. It will help tackle migrant worker exploitation and the misuse of the visa system. The register will provide a resource to check that a sponsoring employer is legitimate, and allow for greater transparency, monitoring and oversight.

It's worth noting that the Skills in Demand visa and the broader Migration Strategy were subject to broad consultation across government, unions, business, civil society, the international education sector and the wider Australian community.

This bill draws on the key findings of the migration review and the 483 public submissions it received. The most egregious exploitation of workers—physical, financial, sexual—happened on the watch of those opposite. Review after review—some commissioned by them; others parliamentary—they did not act. This bill implements actions and commitments outlined in the Migration Strategy, after tripartite consultations with businesses and unions, including the Business Council of Australia and the ACTU.

I am confident the reforms in this bill will have a benefit for outer suburban and regional electorates like mine. This is a challenge for good employers as well as for those workers who work in the sector—migrants and Australians. We want a fair go in the workplace, we want a fair go for family run businesses, we want a fair go for businesses who do the right thing and we want our migration system to have integrity.

Anne Webster (Mallee, National Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Regional Health) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Before I begin a discussion of the Migration Amendment (Strengthening Sponsorship and Nomination Processes) Bill 2024, I want to talk about a panel I was invited to join for the e61 Institute with the members for Wentworth and Fraser this morning in order to discuss the report of the e61 Institute which they launched today, The lucky country or the lucky city? I was proud as the member for Mallee and a member of the Nationals to fly the flag for regional Australia.

The e61 report confirms that, while there is a wage premium for people living in the inner city, the lower income of workers in regional Australia may actually go further, depending, for instance, on the housing situation in that locality. The report makes that point for industrial and care and service workers, who it says 'have for some time experienced higher wages net of housing costs in regional areas than in the city'. The report goes on to say, 'For these workers, the incentive to stay in or move to the city has been weakening.' However I'm sorry to add that, in some parts of Mallee, under the Albanese Labor government, the cost of housing—buying a home or renting—has gone through the roof also, just like the cost of living, which combines to make it harder to secure the workforce that we desperately need in the health sector, in agriculture and across the board.

A recent Suburbtrends report called the Rental pain index showed five of the 12 councils from my electorate in the top 20 for the worst rental pain, with Northern Grampians Shire sadly in second place and Swan Hill in fourth place. With the trend of formerly city based workers heading to the regions, e61's report notes:

… it will be important that regional housing supply can adjust, to accommodate the additional demand without upward pressure on housing costs that could create inequality within regions.

That is what we're already seeing in Mallee.

I note Master Builders Australia have said in their submission to the Senate inquiry into this bill:

Master Builders has long advocated for migration settings that ensure Australia is attracting the right skills. Unfortunately, the Federal Government's policy framework and immigration mechanisms are not kind to migrants who are skilled in building and construction trades. Visas are difficult to secure, costly and come with long processing times. The skills recognition process is cumbersome, costly, slow and in some cases completely unnecessary.

The exclusion of trades occupations from skilled migration is a sure-fire way to exacerbate the housing shortage across the country. With an aging workforce and booming demand for housing and infrastructure, Master Builders anticipates that at least half a million people must enter the industry by 2029. No fewer than two-thirds of these new entrants will need to be skilled tradespeople, just to maintain business as usual. However, securing visas for these critical workers is already a herculean task. They are difficult to secure, costly and plagued by long processing times.

We are in a national housing crisis, with 1.2 million new homes needed to be built between now and June 2029. In the September quarter of 2024 alone, 90,000 new workers are needed to build 60,000 new homes nationwide. The Master Builders' sentiments are similar to those my constituents express to me with increasing frequency. Mallee farmers and small- to medium-sized-business owners rely heavily on skilled migrants to fill critical gaps. Whether it's tradespeople, doctors, nurses, teachers or agricultural workers, migrants are the ones who keep the engine running. But this bill treats these essential workers like spare parts that can be swapped out at will, rather than the vital cogs that keep the machine of regional Australia turning.

Last year in October I spoke briefly in the House as deputy chair of the Parliamentary Joint Standing Committee on Migration on the tabling of our two-year report Migration, pathway to nationbuilding, which I must say we were doing and in the process of when the Labor government also announced a review by Martin Parkinson. I'm proud to say a significant number of the recommendations from our report are specific to regional Australia, starting at recommendation 56, calling for greater uniformity in migration laws and regulations concerning regional Australia.

As shadow Assistant Minister for Regional Health, I particularly emphasise recommendation 60, which urges the government to scale incentives to foster the long-term settlement of healthcare professionals in outer regional and remote areas. One of the most pressing concerns in Mallee and in regional Australia is the shortage of healthcare professionals. Regional healthcare is crucial to the survival and economic growth of regional communities. Working families do not want to move to a country area where they cannot receive adequate health care, it's no surprise. In the short to medium term, international medical professionals are essential to regional healthcare services, bringing not only their skills and expertise but also a deep commitment to serving communities that are often underserviced. Yet, as one South African couple, both medical doctors, told the Leader of the Nationals, David Littleproud, and me during a visit in the south of my electorate in Mallee, it cost them $280,000 to come and practise in Australia.

Regional Australia's dire health workforce needs have been exacerbated by Labor's misguided changes to the distribution priority areas, adding Modified Monash Model 2 areas, like the outer suburban areas of capital cities. This policy shift robbed genuine rural and remote regions of the doctors they desperately need, leading to a 56 per cent increase in doctors leaving the regions within the first six months. International medical professionals face hurdles in the registration process with the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency, AHPRA. In Mallee, I've assisted healthcare providers, advocating to expedite the inordinate processing delays for these professionals. In some communities, patients rely on one doctor. Denying medical care to hundreds of thousands of regional Australians due to bureaucratic red tape is dangerous to people's health and frustrating for the doctors whose ability to practise is jeopardised. This bill could make the situation worse by creating additional compliance requirements for sponsors, potentially leading to even longer delays in bringing skilled medical professionals to our regions. AHPRA must be held accountable for these delays, and the government must take immediate action to address inefficiencies in the system.

Australia also faces a critical shortage of at least 110,000 direct aged-care workers within the next decade, with an annual shortfall of 30,000 to 35,000 according to the Centre for Economic Development of Australia. If these shortages persist, we won't have enough workers to meet the basic care standards recommended by the royal commission. With low-skilled migration levels and a sector attrition rate of around 65,000 people per year, the situation is dire. Regional areas, like my electorate, are hit hardest by these shortages. What's bleak in the city is even more severe in regional Australia. The nation building report noted on sponsorship:

… the Law Council highlighted inflexibility and opacity in the employer sponsored visa program that impedes the ability of businesses to attract and retain workers to service their needs.

They called for:

… better communication and assistance to sponsoring employers to help navigate the complexity, ensure the lodging of 'decision ready applications', and ultimately contribute to a more streamlined process.

As I said at the tabling of the nation building report, the Master Builders also queried whether regional sponsors ought to be exempt from paying for the Skilling Australians Fund, and I repeat what I said then: there is some force to this submission. For agriculture, the nation building report noted:

… the National Farmers' Federation drew attention to the 'significant costs' associated with skills shortage visas, encompassing visa fees, assistance from migration agents or other experts, and the requirement for sponsoring employers to contribute to the Skilling Australians Fund. While acknowledging some of the costs were 'understandable', others, they believed, could be minimised through simplification and streamlining and, in so doing, reduce visa processing cost and the need to engage migration experts.

Recruiting farm labour has always been a challenge, with 57 per cent of farms struggling to find adequate workers. Skilled workers have been instrumental in filling these gaps. Farmers face significant challenges in securing enough workers during peak seasons. The potential penalties for non-compliance are deterring some farmers from participating in sponsorship schemes altogether.

The Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs Legislation Committee concluded its review of this bill in September, and I'll highlight Senator Scarr's additional comments to that report. The Albanese Labor government significantly hiked the TSMIT, the temporary skilled migration income threshold, from $53,900 to $70,000, and again this July to $73,150. Small businesses in the Mallee electorate are shocked at what they must now pay to secure workers. Senator Scarr noted that this bill proposes changing the TSMIT to three other thresholds: the specialist, core and essential skills income thresholds, with the aim of reducing the likelihood of a skilled migrant displacing an Australian worker. That reads like something written by the unions. And here we are, in a relatively full-employment economy, where regional Victoria has the nation's lowest unemployment rate of 3.9 per cent. The Victorian Labor government has been celebrating regional Victoria's low unemployment rate—for instance, welcomed it with fanfare when it was as low as 2.4 per cent in September 2023. According to the Victorian government's three-month average figures, regional unemployment is as low as 1.2 per cent in Warrnambool and south-west Victoria and 1.3 per cent in Shepparton. However, I have to emphasise that it's actually 5.4 per cent in my electorate of Mallee and the same in Gippsland.

Regional Australia is the backbone of our nation, contributing the farmers, the builders and the engineers of our prosperity, feeding and clothing the nation and the world. I made these very points recently, in marking the centenary celebrations at Robinvale, where I had also taken the migration committee during our two-year report deliberations. Migrants of Italian and Greek origin, in particular, have underpinned Robinvale's economic success as an irrigation powerhouse.

Instead of adding more layers of bureaucracy, we should be looking at ways to streamline the process for bringing skilled migrants to regional areas. This could include faster processing times for regional sponsorships, reduced compliance burdens for regional employers and greater support for organisations that sponsor skilled migrants.

When you consider the migrant workforce in my region, and the inordinate percentage of my electorate office's work spent in progressing migration matters, the government should consider a dedicated migration navigator in Mildura to streamline processing. It's not good enough to outsource expediting of visas to the offices of members of parliament, where we have no jurisdiction. There has been a significant increase in Mallee small business constituents coming to me, wanting me to help them to navigate the visa system. Some have been priced out of being able to afford workers due to the TSMIT changes. Others can't afford migration agents or lawyers, and the department is not in a position to provide guidance.

It feels as though Labor, by design, are trying to crush small business into submission or into insolvency in record numbers, so that unionised big business and government-run agencies can theoretically step in to run the country. However, we, on this side of the House, pay attention to history and outcomes. We know that Labor's controlled economies do not benefit the regions but, rather, capital cities, and, therefore, rob from regions to buy votes in the inner cities.

I urge the government to reconsider the provisions of this bill and to work with regional communities to develop policies that support their growth and development. After all, we've seen this movie before. Labor comes in with rushed immigration legislation, leaving loopholes that need to be fixed later on. Our regional communities deserve better resources and better outcomes.

Graham Perrett (Moreton, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This continent has a long history of migration. The first black feet were placed on the continent around 60,000 to 100,000 years ago in Queensland. The first white feet belonged to the Dutch navigator Willem Janszoon, who, on 26 February 1606, set foot on land at Pennefather River on the western side of Cape York. That was 164 years before Lieutenant Cook raised his flag at Possession Island in the Torres Strait. Interestingly, Torres sailed through but do not actually stop in Australia, but he still has the Torres Strait named after him.

Willem Janszoon wanted to call the place where he set foot New Zealand, but the name never actually took off. Just for the record, I want to say that Queensland had the name first, so we even had 'New Zealand' before New Zealand, as I am sure some people might be interested to hear. The place across the ditch should be called the 'second-best New Zealand', as I'm sure everyone in this chamber would testify.

We have a long history of migration, and it's good to see that Queensland was involved right from the start. Migration has always been central to the Australian story. Although, in the 1960s and 1970s, Queensland had a lower-than-normal intake of migrants, even through the great wave of migration that occurred after World War II; not as many came to Queensland.

There have been many iterations of migration schemes and policies, some of which we can be proud and some of which were downright shameful. In Queensland, we have a major city named after Townsville, a guy who was a slave trader in terms of blackbirding, which was the slave trade in Queensland. Sadly, it is still sometimes necessary these days to counter despicable anti-immigration rhetoric when it is used by those seeking to encourage fear and division in our society, especially some of those extremist parties, those fringe protest parties, who are even in the federal parliament.

Migration policies are shaped by the prevailing social, cultural and political norms and economic imperatives of different eras. I think it was Menzies, particularly, who saw the 4.2 million people arrive in the 40 years after the end of World War II. Those people brought with them cultures, languages, arts and food, and they bolstered the Australian workforce with their skills, expertise and labour. This was part of the 'populate or perish' drive for migration. It was a key component of the nation-building plan, and it led to a booming economy.

The numerous different approaches to migration through the years speak to the need to revise and update policy on a regular basis to both meet changing Australian requirements and benefit the nation—and to look at what is going on around the world. This did not happen under that conga line of Abbot, Turnbull, Morrison governments. At the end of the nine years of conservative chaos, the migration system was in such a mess that the independent reviewer, the very well-respected Dr Martin Parkinson, described it as 'badly broken' after years of 'deliberate neglect'. With a lack of direction during these years, migration did little to provide economic benefit, and it did not boost labour productivity. Whereas, it is actually the lowest hanging fruit. People arrive educated, fed and trained, and they're here on our shores ready to work. The migration system the Labor government inherited was exposed to exploitation. It was not working for business, workers or the Australia public, and it was in no way ready for the reopening of borders in early 2022.

In December 2023, the Albanese Labor government launched the Migration Strategy, a fresh and fit-for-purpose approach to migration. It's the cornerstone of this Labor government's commitment to fix the broken migration system, to make it work better for migrants but also, more importantly, dare I say, the Australian economy and the Australian people. The strategy will enable us to get the skills our economy needs, while also halving the migration intake, which is appropriate when we don't have enough houses for the people who are here at the moment. It makes the crucial point that 'ultimately the success of our migration system relies on the backing of the Australian people'. That's why one of its key aims is to rebuild social licence by returning migration levels to normal. It will fix the visa backlog of almost a million that we inherited. It will fix the visa system abuses. It will resolve issues in international student numbers. Crucially, it also focuses on planning and implementing the program to meet the current skills shortage needs—where we need them.

This has been welcomed by companies like Transvent, which operates an air conditioning spiral duct manufacturing facility in my electorate of Moreton. When I visited Manager Shane Morris and his team recently, they told me about their considerable but ultimately unsuccessful efforts to hire locally—to the extent where they had signs out on Bradman Street trying to lure people in and ads placed all around the world. Shane indicated that the skills shortage in this area has stymied growth for a number of welding and manufacturing businesses. He said:

Skilled labour is a major issue for manufacturers these days. I know of companies now going offshore for supply or setting up their own manufacturing facilities overseas due to labour shortages in Australia.

He agrees that the skills shortage needs to be addressed urgently.

The Migration Amendment (Strengthening Sponsorship and Nomination Processes) Bill 2024 addresses the damaging skills shortage and implements the key commitments of the strategy. It amends the Migration Act 1958 to put in place a new skills in demand visa, a new approach to temporary skilled migration from December this year. You can trust a Labor government to protect workers, and that is what this bill will do. This is the land of the fair go, after all, and it's only just that those who move to Australia to work receive the same fair go.

Annual indexation of the thresholds is a requirement to protect wages and conditions for both local workers and migrant workers. We don't want our migrant workers to be vulnerable and exploited, and ensuring that migrant wages increase alongside other wages protects against that. Indexation of income thresholds was recommended as far back as 2017, when the Leader of the Opposition commissioned a review. It will come as no surprise that the former government failed to act on this recommendation. The temporary skilled migration income threshold was $53,900 on 1 July 2013 and it was exactly the same amount on 30 June 2023. Unbelievable! It's more proof that the former government wasn't interested in getting wages moving. I always remember Minister Mathias Cormann belling the coalition cat when he said low wages were a deliberate design feature of their economy.

The coalition definitely weren't interested in the efficient management of the migration system. This bill addresses the problems left to us by the coalition by implementing three streams. The first is the specialist skills pathway, designed to attract highly skilled specialist workers. The income threshold for them will be $135,000, and it's open to migrants in any occupation who earn more than that.

The second stream is called the core skills pathway. To meet the needs of Australian employers, applicants need to meet the occupations listed on the Jobs and Skills Australia list. They also need to earn more than the current skilled migration income, which has been indexed to $73,150. The bill will rename this the core skills income threshold. The occupations included on the core skills occupation list are not prioritised and there are no limits on how many occupations can be listed. There is also no limit on the number of visas that can be granted for any given occupation. The number of visas will be driven by the level of demand from employer sponsors, meaning that business need is the driving force.

The third stream, the essential skills pathway, will promote the migration of workers with essential skills. The parameters of this pathway are still under development and will be announced soon.

Another key facet of this bill is the development of a public register of sponsors. This will have the benefit of increasing transparency in the system and engendering public trust. The public register will contain a list of businesses approved by the Department of Home Affairs to sponsor migrant workers. The register will make it easier for temporary skilled migrant workers to change jobs, as they'll be able to consult the list to find a new sponsor if things aren't working out in their workplace. The register will contain information such as the business number of sponsored workers and their occupations. It will also include business location information, to make worker mobility easier and more efficient while still ensuring that workers are directed towards high-needs areas in the economy. It will give migrant workers the confidence that their employer is legitimate and therefore decrease the possibility of exploitation—something no-one would like.

The bill also implements changes to labour market testing, making it valid for six months rather than four. This will benefit businesses, who will have increased flexibility to meet the testing requirements and resolve their skills shortage needs. This bill is focused on responsibly continuing Australia's commitment to migration, our multicultural community and our worldwide connections. It will develop and maintain a more prosperous, more fair and more secure labour market in Australia. It will work for businesses by securing the workers they need when they need them and promoting business growth and prosperity. Crucially it will benefit workers by securing protections for wages and conditions through indexed salary thresholds. This bill will ensure sustainable migration levels and ensure we get the skills that are in demand to boost productivity. Labor's plan for migration sets us up for the future, and I commend this bill to the House.

Dai Le (Fowler, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

In early July this year, an Australian family owned business of over 55 years, BE Campbell, reached out to me to share their struggle to recruit skilled meatworkers despite their efforts to attract and train local workers. This industry is labour intensive, and the reality is that skilled meatworkers are notoriously difficult to recruit. Unfortunately this critical challenge to its business has compelled BE Campbell to source some of its skilled workers from overseas to remain viable.

The current Temporary Skilled Migration Income Threshold is set at a level relevant to industries such as nursing, IT and engineering. Skilled meatworkers earn significantly less than these professions. Essentially, BE Campbell is faced with three major hurdles in recruiting skilled meatworkers: (1) attracting local skilled meatworkers to meet their business needs, (2) local workers are not entering the meat processing industry, as they can earn the same or more in other less laborious industries and (3) the TSMIT is set well above the rate of pay for locally recruited skilled workers in the meat industry, creating a major barrier to recruiting overseas skilled workers. As a consequence of these major hurdles, BE Campbell is now considering the possibility of downsizing the business in order to survive. They are one of the largest meat processors in Australia, and scaling back their operations due to a lack of workers can only be bad for our economy and bad for consumers.

Skilled migration has long been a cornerstone of Australia's economic growth, contributing to our diverse and dynamic workforce. Over the years, our migration policies have evolved to meet the changing needs of our economy. However, the significant shift in our skilled workforce landscape is a matter of concern, and, as the federal representative of an electorate that includes businesses struggling with a shortage of skilled workers, I'm deeply concerned about the implications of these changes. To be clear, I welcome the long overdue reform of our migration system, and I welcome the government's effort to create a more equitable balance for both employers and migrant workers. However, it is crucial that we carefully consider the impact of these reforms on all stakeholders involved.

BE Campbell is only one example within the meat processing industry facing challenges in hiring skilled migrant workers. However, this pressure is felt across many other industries. I opened this speech by sharing this case because it shows where the migration system is not working and redress is urgently needed. Under this bill the TSMIT will be replaced with the core skills income threshold of $73,150 and the specialist skills income threshold of $135,000. The government's rationale of a legislated minimum income threshold is to ensure that migrants coming to Australia to work are not vulnerable to exploitation and that there is fair remuneration through indexed salary thresholds. This sounds like a great intention. The majority of skilled migrant workers fall under the core skills stream, earning a minimum of $73,150 per year. This threshold is significantly higher than the award rates for skilled meatworkers under the meat industry award.

I'm fully in agreement that the new scheme may offer greater protection for migrant workers, but my question is: is the government also taking into consideration the struggles SME employers are currently experiencing in attracting skilled workers? In a manufacturing roundtable with many local SMEs that I held in Fowler recently in Western Sydney, the majority expressed the challenges their businesses are facing in finding local workers while facing the escalating costs of rent, wages, materials, compliance, freight and goods. Businesses like BE Campbell have made it clear to me that they are concerned that increased thresholds would cause inequity between overseas and local migrant workers and that they need to bring in this specific meat-processing skilled workforce to meet customer demand and create job opportunities, otherwise they will be forced to scale back their operations.

Each industry has unique market remuneration standards. It's not a one-size-fits-all legislated threshold. If the government had engaged extensively with our SMEs—the likes of BE Campbell and Primo Foods—they would surely have understood that this one-size-fits-all approach wouldn't work. I asked the government to conduct further consultation on whether a simplistic legislative income threshold is the optimal solution or whether there is a fairer way to set remuneration that balances the needs of skilled migrant workers and employers.

With regard to legislating a publicly available sponsor register under proposed section 140GE as a mechanism to prevent migrant worker exploitation, I am concerned about the unintended consequences. My husband often says that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. I understand that this instrument would provide for the Department of Home Affairs to create a register of approved sponsors, including the sponsor's business name, the ABN and the number of people that they have sponsored, among other information. This measure came from the 2023 review of the migration system to address worker exploitation and allow migrant workers to check the legitimacy of their employer. This provision is a double-edged sword. A public register would allow for greater transparency and confidence in sponsorships. However, this would place a greater administrative burden on businesses to access skilled migrant workers to supplement their workforces.

If anyone in government has operated a small business, they would surely be aware of the regulatory burden on SMEs, such as environmental regulations, diversity compliance, changes to industrial relations and welding regulations, for example, which all contribute towards the operating cost of a business that has to bear the burden of increased energy, wages, materials, rent, transport, insurance and logistic costs, just to name a few. I'm also concerned that a public register may deter businesses from seeking to sponsor overseas workers, as they may be required to disclose commercially sensitive information that would be accessible to their competitors. This may also open a can of worms to other potential privacy concerns and misuse of data. Sole traders, especially those from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds, may not engage in an overly bureaucratic process that is difficult to navigate.

The proposed section 140GBA proposes extension of the labour market testing, the LMT, from four to six months. I appreciate that LMT is an important process to ensure that an overseas worker is only engaged if there are no Australians qualified and available to do the job. However, there are industries that cannot afford the time to undergo labour market testing and require overseas workers urgently to support their business. I asked the government to consider the concessions that we can give to businesses regarding the LMT, including potential exemptions to LMT for certain industries, like BE Campbell, that are experiencing chronic workforce shortages. In our round table, many of the local small manufacturing companies have 50 job vacancies and other vacancies that they cannot fill, so this is going to be a challenge for many of those SMEs. Therefore any reform in the migration system should include provisions to specifically address the needs and challenges faced by SMEs. This could include a streamlined process for sponsorship, reduced administrative burdens and financial concessions.

Overall, I welcome the reform of the migration system to strengthen the sponsorship and nomination process and to more greatly protect vulnerable migrant workers. However, I ask the government to ensure that the needs of businesses, particularly SMEs, are given equal consideration, as they are the backbone of our economy. Businesses like BE Campbell need our support or our economy and local consumers will be impacted. A balanced approach that protects migrant workers while also addressing the needs and challenges of businesses is essential for the success of these reforms. I call on the government to engage in further consultation with all stakeholders, including businesses, industry bodies and migrant worker advocacy groups to ensure the legislation is fair, effective and sustainable.

Steve Georganas (Adelaide, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

We know that Australia has had a long history—a long and proud history and in some cases a not-so-proud history—on migration. The first migrants were the ancestors of our Aboriginal Australians, first arriving in Australia around 80,000 years ago. We then had the first European settlements in 1788: the British established a colony of New South Wales—a penal colony, in fact—marking the beginning of a permanent European settlement. We then had periods like the gold rush: the discovery of gold in 1851 triggered a massive flow of migrants into Australia. Nearly 600,000 people came into Australia over that period, and most came from the UK, Britain, et cetera but many also came from Asia—China and around that area—and from the US and other countries. We had Afghans that we encouraged to migrate to Australia in the 1800s as cavaliers to go to the centre of Australia.

We can see that Australia's migration policies have always morphed into what Australia needed, whether that be its economic situation, its workforce or just to populate Australia. A blemish—a big blemish—on our migration policy was the White Australia policy. From 1901 Australia maintained the White Australia policy, which required migrants to pass a dictation test in a European language to be able to come here. This policy was abolished after World War II—we had an intake of migrants from all over Europe from 1948 onwards and that was the postwar era. After World War II Australia promoted immigration to the nation with the slogan 'populate or perish', which was very famous. We brought in the Assisted Passage Migration scheme for many thousands of Brits, and then opened up to southern Europeans, who were seen as not quite Europeans up until 1948 but passed the mark because they were a bit whiter in colour et cetera.

These are some of the blemishes and some of the positives of our migration acts over the years. I am a product of southern European migrants who migrated to Australia after World War II. We've heard other speakers speak about migrants from all over the world, from every single corner of the world, who have made their homes here in Australia and have become great Australians. We know that Australia has had to tinker with its immigration policies, whether in a big way or a small way, to assist our particular needs of the time, and this piece of legislation is part of that history that we've had in migration for years, trying to ensure that we adjust our migration policies to assist what we require today from migrants and the future of Australia.

Back in 1948 there was a really interesting debate prior to bringing in Arthur Calwell's Assisted Passage Migration scheme to Australia for southern Europeans. There was a really interesting debate that took place in this House. There was one side of politics that debated and wanted to ensure that these migrants that were coming in would be paid at lesser wages—that was the wish of the conservative side of politics. On the Labor side, in those days very dominated by unions, they knew that would be the spiralling effect to the bottom when it came to equity and wages, and they argued strongly against any difference in wages. Thank God, this side of the House prevailed, and we've always had a very equitable wage system regardless of who you are and regardless of where you come from. Could you imagine the type of nation we would be today had the other side of politics prevailed? Could you imagine where we would be today? Some of the things in this particular bill want to ensure that we don't have what I just spoke about creep in, and that's why we have brought many of these points in this particular bill. We want to ensure fairness of wages for everyone in Australia regardless of where you come from, why you're here et cetera. We also know that this will help businesses who are looking at migrants to fill positions. It will also ensure that we fix the bits and pieces that we see are broken in our migration system.

The bill legislates the indexation of the minimum income thresholds for migrants in the government's new skills in demand visa in line with the wages of local workers. Again that is ensuring that equity in wages will remain into the future regardless of where you've come from and why you're here. Indexing these income thresholds is important to maintain system integrity over time and to ensure the temporary skilled migration program remains targeted towards the skilled workers Australia needs. This is about making sure the skilled migration system does what it says on the label. This will help us maintain that social licence for our skilled migration program. Indexing these thresholds is absolutely critical to protecting wages and conditions for local workers and ensuring that migrant workers are not vulnerable to exploitation. We want to ensure that that spiralling effect to the bottom doesn't happen. It can easily happen if we don't deal with some of these things and we allow them to creep in naturally, as may have been the case. We want to make sure that wages are equitable for everyone.

The bill also supports greater transparency in the skilled migration system and supports the government's commitment to enabling mobility for migrant workers. This is about setting up a public register of sponsors so that migrant workers that have come here on temporary skilled migration visas can apply for another job if there is one which fits their skills and is also registered. It allows that movement of workers in the workforce. The register will assist with mobility, helping temporary skilled migrant workers find a new sponsor if they wish to change jobs and also giving them the ability to choose if they're not happy where they are. All of us here and people anywhere in Australia can pick and choose if we want to leave where we're working and go and apply somewhere else. It's giving that same equity, the same ability, to migrant workers as well. By including postcodes registered with approved sponsors, it will enable migrants searching for mobility to identify employers nearby and increase the practicality of the register.

The register will encourage transparency and is also a resource for temporary skilled migrant workers to check that a sponsoring employer is legitimate. We've heard many stories where there have been issues with migrant workers. There are very few overall, but they're pretty horrific when you do hear them. We want to make sure that they have another mechanism which checks the box that the sponsor is a legit sponsor. It will also help to reduce temporary skilled migrant workers' susceptibility to exploitation. Streamlining labour market testing is another big issue in this bill. The bill will also make amendments to the Migration Act that mean labour market testing will be valid for six months, increasing it from four months. This will make it much easier for businesses to meet their skills needs, providing more flexibility for businesses to meet their labour market testing requirements.

As I said at the beginning, Australia has a long history of migration. The majority of it has been a successful history, with migrants from every corner of the world coming to this place, including the member for Bennelong, who's here next to me, whose parents migrated here. All you have to do is scratch the surface a bit when you're speaking to anyone, apart from our First Nations people, who have been here for 80,000 years. The rest of us have all come from somewhere, whether it be your parents, your grandparents or relatives five, six, seven or eight generations ago. The idea of migration here in Australia is something that is very special. It is very special to me to think that I live in a country where people come from all over the world and we live in peace and harmony. It is one of the greatest things that we have as an asset.

Migration will continue in this nation. It will continue for many years to come. Our job, as members of parliament, as governments, is to ensure that we make it as equitable as possible both for the migrants and the people who are already established here.

One of the things that I said earlier is that we had a debate in this place in 1948. Can you imagine, had the conservative side of politics won that debate back then, where we would be as a nation today? That's why it is important to ensure that, when we are dealing with legislation, with migration, that we look at wage fairness and ensure we do everything that we can to protect people's wages—for those that are established already here and those that are coming to our nation.

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

I want to place a few brief remarks on the record about the Migration Amendment (Strengthening Sponsorship and Nomination Processes) Bill 2024, about the Greens position on this bill. Further contributions will be taken up by our portfolio holders, when the bill comes to the Senate.

We view this bill as a modest but positive step towards protecting some of the most vulnerable workers in Australia. It is something that the Greens have had some concerns about for some time and have made the point very clearly that, when you have the interaction between migration and employment laws that allow huge holes to be opened up in the protections that are meant to apply, it not only hurts vulnerable workers but local workers as well. That's because, if you end up with a race to the bottom on things like wages, then you not only end up with massive exploitation of people who've really just come here seeking a better life, in the way that would happen for many of us, for our families and for so many in this country, as a previous member said, but you also contribute to a driving down of wages and conditions across the board, generally.

In a previous parliament, we pushed hard against the former government's approach to that, and in this parliament as well, we have proudly joined in passing legislation that goes some way to restoring a strong floor for everyone who is in this country—because that's it what it needs to be. There can't be gaps in it. If there are gaps in it, we know that everyone suffers.

However, there are some aspects of the bill that remain unclear, and we do think more needs to be done to protect people who come to Australia to contribute to the community. We support the passage of this bill in the House and reserve our Senate position, based on some of the matters that I'll outline here and that will be further pursued in the Senate.

For too long, as I said, workers from other countries have been subjected to exploitation and denied rights by a visa sponsorship program that provides disproportionate power to employers. This bill goes some of the way to addressing this imbalance. One of our concerns is that, in its proposed form, the specialist skills pathway does not wholly address all the concerns with the sponsorship visa program, raised in the migration review, and it does not deliver a skilled sponsorship program that properly responds to the domestic labour market.

That pathway is meant to focus on niche, specialist skills that fall outside of current definitions, but the proposed pathway only has a monetary threshold. The unintended consequence of not having a clear definition for this pathway could mean that the oversight provided by Jobs and Skills Australia over the core skills pathway is circumvented. Clarifying the definition would prevent this and prevent the need for ad hoc carve outs for selected occupations. Furthermore, workers on the essential skills pathway can be making as little as $51,222.

By allowing for workers to be paid less than the core skills threshold, this potentially denies them the ability to live full lives here. As the Immigration Advice and Rights Centre, in its submission, noted:

Migrants in the Essential Skills Pathway are more vulnerable and liable to workplace exploitation because of these lower pay rates.

Allowing workers on the essential skills pathway to apply for secondary employment could correct this and protect workers. Workers cannot be held by their employer in employment that does not give them the tools to live a full life.

Finally, the bill would also introduce a public register of approved sponsors. But, as the Australian Council of Trade Unions, the ACTU, noted:

The register proposed in this bill is an important step, but must be expanded to require approved employer sponsors to also disclose how many other temporary migrant workers they engage by visa type, and in which occupations and postcodes, to enable improved oversight. The public register must also be expanded to cover employers that engage other temporary migrant workers, requiring them to disclose the same information required of approved employer sponsors, by visa type, as a measure to improve transparency and address worker exploitation.

Australia should be a safe place for all workers, and people who come here to contribute to the community should be protected. This bill will strengthen the rights of workers and migrants. However, much more needs to be done to create a fair immigration system. There are many workers in Australia who came here to contribute but have been denied basic rights, so this bill needs to be the start, not the end. I look forward to having discussions with the government about the amendments that we are proposing.

Michael McCormack (Riverina, National Party, Shadow Minister for International Development and the Pacific) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It's not often I find myself in furious agreement with the Greens leader, the member for Melbourne, but the points he made towards the end of his contribution were quite correct. People who come to this country to work, under whatever visa arrangements, should be treated every bit as fairly and equally as Australian workers and should be paid their due amount. In that respect I agree with him. I don't think anybody in the parliament would not concur with that.

The Migration Amendment (Strengthening Sponsorship and Nomination Processes) Bill 2024 is policy that the coalition generally supports the intent of, but there are some concerns. I appreciate that these will also be flagged when this reaches the Senate. There are concerns about the process to determine if an occupation is on the relevant skilled occupation list.

I will digress a little bit. I well remember, when I was the Deputy Prime Minister and we were putting in place new visa arrangements for certain occupations—and the member for Flynn will be interested in this—we had a list of occupations that came under these skilled clauses, and one of the skilled occupations that was not on the list was truck driver. I note that Ron Finemore, who has his own transport company—synonymous with the red-and-green livery—advertises all the time in my local newspaper, the Daily Advertiser, and online for truckies. Finemore has searched all around the world for truck drivers. He, like many other regional truck companies, has B-doubles and other rigs backed up to fences in their yards because they simply can't find workers. And yet it wasn't on that skilled occupations list that we had in place, and I think it was a missed opportunity. I know the member for Gladstone has a heavy vehicle drivers licence. He's the proud owner of a very fine Mac truck semitrailer, and he knows just how important trucks are, particularly in Queensland—a large state with lots of goods, cattle and other stock to be moved around.

Truckies keep our country moving. I defy anybody to deny that a truck driver who can reverse a B-double into some of those tight nooks and crannies, particularly around supermarkets, is skilled. If that isn't highly skilled, then I'm badly mistaken. But we didn't do it. It was a missed opportunity at the outset, and I think in any of these skilled migration clauses, acts, bills, lists—call them what you like—truck drivers should be on the list, if not top of the list.

How quickly will the skilled occupation list be able to be changed to respond to changes in certain occupations? That is a consideration I raise. How will one list address geographic skills gaps? You would know full well, Deputy Speaker, being the member for Lingiari, that outstanding electorate in the Northern Territory—and I'm very proud of the role I played to continue to have Lingiari as a House of Representatives seat—just how important it is to have those skills gaps filled in our regional electorates. I don't think our city friends get it. I'll just put that. It doesn't matter what side of politics they are on. I just don't think they understand the complexities of regional living, particularly outback living. I admire those members who are in those larger sprawling outback electorates for the job they do advocating here to get more skilled people in their electorates. So thank you, Deputy Speaker Scrymgour, for what you do.

Another consideration is: how quickly will the list be able to be adjusted to seasonal requirements? I know that, unfortunately, Labor is axing the live sheep trade, and shame on Labor for doing that. You get these city types who get up here with their prepared notes, saying, 'Let's just send the Gulf states chilled boxed sheepmeat.' Well, they don't want it. They want live sheep offloaded off ships—off Australian ships with very high animal welfare standards—to have for their own processing. The city members won't get that, but we get it because we're from the bush and we get it because we have farmers, particularly stock producers, who come to our electorate offices and tell us of the hardships they have to find people. They tell us of the hardships they have to truck their stock. And they tell us of all the other factors that are important considerations in the important work they do—and the important work they do is to feed us and to feed other nations besides.

It is more than that. Try finding enough workers to fill the roles required in abattoirs. It's very seasonal work. It's hard enough to find them in Wagga Wagga, where we have the biggest livestock exchange in the Southern Hemisphere, let alone in Forbes, which is also in my electorate for the time being, where we have the second-biggest livestock centre in the Southern Hemisphere. Wagga Wagga has a fine cattle processing plant. Forbes is trying to reopen an abattoir; they have plans to do just that sometime in the future. I know the Cootamundra meat works has reopened and is now doing multispecies, where before, when it was owned by the Manildra Group, it was only doing sheep. But they're in places where there are plenty of workers. Try finding workers, skilled or otherwise, to fill those places, to build the new abattoirs, in outback, remote Australia. Good luck! But you'll get the teals standing up and saying, 'Let's just build more abattoirs.' Yeah, let's build rainbow land while we're at it! It's just nonsense. They don't get it. They don't understand it. They never go beyond the sandstone curtain that is the Blue Mountains to ever find out what's going on in regional Australia, and then they expect to lecture us in their pious, perfectionist way. They're absolutely sanctimonious. I hope, when I come back in my next life, that I can be as perfect and pious as one of them. But let's move on.

How well will the skilled occupation list cater for the different employment needs across regional areas? This is simply unknown. I know when I visited the Northern Territory, as I did often when I was the Deputy Prime Minister, how hard it was to find mango pickers. We've got fine mangos up in the Northern Territory, some of the best in Australia, but it's really hard to find people to do that job. Some city types will tell you: 'Well, that's just picking mangoes. How hard can it be?' But it's very hard. It's very tough. It's backbreaking work, and it's also a skill. There's a lot of skill required to do that. There are real concerns, and it is unknown how well Jobs and Skills Australia will function and respond to the needs of the employment market. That's the other consideration that we do need to take into account—how Jobs and Skills Australia will adapt and adopt this particular legislation once the bill has passed.

It's unknown as well what influence the unions will have on shaping the jobs on the skilled occupation list. Will we have the CFMEU limiting the number of builders who are allowed to get a visa, so that they can artificially prop up their ridiculous, exorbitant wage demands? This has to be a real consideration. You had the CFMEU there just recently wanting to stop all work on AFL projects simply because they didn't like somebody who was in charge of the AFL umpires. So John Setka and his thug mates tried to bully-boy the AFL into sacking the bloke. This is Australia. It's not Europe decades ago. It's not Britain prior to Maggie Thatcher. We don't get run by the unions. Labor might take a lot of donations from them, but it's this parliament that runs the nation. I'd like to think that we do it in a fair, appropriate way. That is why we have one of the highest minimum wages if not the highest in the world. We do.

Just last week, I was in Morocco, and I was amazed whilst I was in Casablanca to see the Hassan II Mosque. This particular mosque was built at a cost of $700 million. I know they don't like to talk about that, because it's not about the dollars; it's about the faith and what it represents—the symbolism it brings. That's fair enough. But it was built because King Mohammed VI wanted to inspire the next line of apprentices. The ground for the mosque was broken on 12 July 1986, and it was completed on 30 August 1993. And you should see it. It is an edifice to be admired. If there were a current Seven Wonders of the World, it would be amongst them. It is one of the largest mosques in all of Africa, if not the world, and they built it with apprentices, on budget and on time. I must say—I looked at this, having been the former infrastructure minister, with a little bit of envy. That's because I thought, 'Imagine if we tried to build something—' I mean, just imagine trying to build anything in Australia! You've got to go through cultural, heritage and environment considerations. That's fair enough, too, but we put everything up against trying to build anything. We sometimes are a banana republic and will build absolutely nothing anywhere or near anything. Sadly, that is often the case.

This bill is important. The three proposed income thresholds will replace the current situation. The minimum income thresholds are the specialist skills income threshold, the core skills income threshold and the essential skills income threshold, which I appreciate is continuing to be developed by the sitting government. The bill proposes that the amounts for the SSIT and CSIT will be indexed each year on 1 July. That's fair enough. Submissions have been put forward to the Senate committee. They raised the issue of wage disparity between visa holders being paid the SSIT and the CSIT, which could cause wages disparity to an Australian worker performing an Australian role. We don't want that; of course we don't. I will digress a little bit in the time remaining. I hark back to the Pacific Australia Labour Mobility scheme changes that Labor introduced at the behest of their Labor mates. I arked up about it. Thankfully, Labor changed it so that it wouldn't make a minimum number of hours per week, but they spread it over a longer period. And you'd appreciate this, Deputy Speaker Scrymgour, because it was about seasonality. Why would you be paying someone who's just going to be sitting around in a part-time capacity a full-time wage, when they can't do anything because of weather or other considerations?

Thankfully, the government made changes—sensibly, because farmers were walking away from it, and, dare I say it, the Pacific island nations were walking away from it. Thankfully, some sanity prevailed. But I do worry, because the changes have been put in place for only 12 months. That needs to be rectified about mid next year.

This particular bill is important. It is, as it says, strengthening sponsorship and nomination processes—if it lives up to its name. I know Labor are always very clever with the titles that they put over their bills; they make out that the bill's going to be the be-all and catch-all. But if it does what the title of the bill suggests, then well and good. If it does that, that's great. But I do urge and encourage the minister to give every consideration to what regional stakeholders think and need and want and expect, because all too often this government, which is very antirural, forgets those people who put the food on our plates and the fibre on our backs.

Jenny Ware (Hughes, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Before I commence, I just want to congratulate the member for Lingiari for her promotion to the Speaker's panel.

I rise to speak on the Migration Amendment (Strengthening Sponsorship and Nomination Processes) Bill 2024. This bill implements certain measures from the government's Migration Strategy, 'Getting migration working for the nation', related to skilled visas.

I want to start by talking about the very proud history that Australia has in the migration space. We are certainly a nation shaped and invigorated by the diverse cultures and talents of millions of our migrants. Of course, we start our migration history approximately 65,000 years ago, when the first of our now Indigenous Australians landed on our shores. This tradition of coming to Australia of course then started again with the British arriving here in 1788. With the arrival of the British, we ended up developing very important Western European institutions, such as the Westminster system of government, democracy and universal adult suffrage. We were, proudly, the second country in the world to give women the vote, and that is something that I think we should be very proud of as Australians.

Then our traditional migration culture continued, as we started to welcome others from all around the world. For example, in the 1850s, people from China first started to arrive. They rushed here to work on the gold rushes, for example, and I've got this statistic: in 1855, in Melbourne alone, there were 11,493 arrivals of Chinese people, which I think is quite an amazing stat when we consider how long ago that was.

Then, later on, towards the end of the 1800s, we had Afghans arrive here, and with their arrival, of course, they brought the camel, now known as the 'ship of the desert'. We again welcomed and opened our doors to many Afghanis in the 1980s and 1990s, following the war, first of all, against the Soviet Union and then the other wars of the 1990s. In that decade alone, around 7,000 Afghans landed on our shores.

We have, at the end of the day, become one of the most successful multicultural nations—I think, the most successful multicultural nation—in the world. It has been built on the nature of people arriving in our country and them having regard to their former heritage but embracing the traditions of Australia and the Australian way of life. Particularly at the end of World War II, we realised that we desperately needed a lot more skilled workers, and we took the opportunity with the dreadful decimation and devastation that had occurred in western and eastern Europe throughout World War II to welcome primarily Europeans to our shores. This tradition continued throughout the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s as we then opened our doors to people from Africa, the Americas, Asia, South-East Asia, the South Pacific and essentially all around the world. So we have a very proud history. Our immigrant story is a very proud one that's essential to our story.

We landed a position where today more than half of all Australians were either born overseas or have a parent born overseas. In my electorate of Hughes, we have people who have come to Australia from all around the world. For me, I don't have the romantic immigrant story that so many of my colleagues can speak about. I am fourth-generation Australian, but my great-grandparents, I'm told, did come here from England, Ireland, Scotland and other places.

Our immigration system is important. What we have seen under this government, unfortunately—under this Labor government, which prides itself on being a party friendly to immigration and to immigrants generally—is a failure so far to have addressed the skills shortage problem that we have in Australia. We have this shortage across professions, across trades. I have spoken about the shortage of GPs within my electorate. I have also spoken about the manufacturing sector within my electorate, throughout Moorebank, throughout Ingleburn, which is a new part of the electorate—it will be within the electorate of Hughes. We have manufacturing there, and they cannot get most of the apprentices, they can't get trades, and there is a massive shortage of things, from machinists to fitters and turners—all of those skills that are needed to run our manufacturing sector.

Then we turn to the construction and building industry. I have spoken in this place before about the chronic shortage that we have in areas such as building, electrical trades, the plumbing trades, the tiling trades and the roofers. So I ask: why is it that this government is not putting more money into domestic trades and into encouraging those trades that are going to build the supposed 1.2 million homes that we hear the Minister for Housing is going to build? We will wait a long time, I suggest, to see that.

There's another big area where there is a massive skills shortage in this country, and that's in aged care. In my electorate over at Hammondville, HammondCare provides residential care and particularly specialises in looking after elderly Australians who are suffering from dementia. I have been over to HammondCare on a number of occasions, and they have said to me over and over again that the shortage is caused not by people who don't want to work in aged care but largely by the lack of housing that is available for workers in aged care, and it's also of course linked to the very low wages that they are paid. So there is a big demand in our country to have to bring in aged-care workers from outside of Australia.

This legislation states that it intends to try to address the skills shortage. But, as with anything—and with all of Labor's legislation—we particularly have to look at it. We say that the devil is definitely in the detail. What is the bill providing for? It states that it's for certain settings for a new temporary Skills in Demand visa to replace the current Temporary Skill Shortage visa.

The Skills in Demand visa is going to consist largely of three different streams. There's a specialist skills stream. This will be for highly skilled workers earning over $135,000 per year. Interestingly, in that there are no trades. The trades are excluded. There are plenty of tradespeople who earn more than $135,000 a year. Again, I think this shows the lack of education and understanding that Labor has regarding the trades and the sorts of income levels that people in the trades are now earning. The second component is what's called a core skills stream. That is supposedly for workers earning over $73,150 per year in an occupation in shortage. The third category is simply a stream for workers with essential skills.

Again, we hear that and think: 'It seems that they're covering all of the bases that we need,' but there is no specific occupation list for the specialist skills pathway that's designed for high-income professionals, for example. There is no occupation list, but it definitely excludes trades workers, machine operators, drivers and labourers. I know plenty of machine operators working in manufacturing within my electorate who earn more than $135,000 per year, so Labor, again, in their usual way, have failed to do their research and have failed to bring some intellectual rigour to this legislation.

Then, if we look at that, it includes, for example, a register of approved work sponsors. While we on our side generally support the policy intent of the bill, we certainly need to close the gap. From our immigrants, we need to build the numbers of these skilled workers so that we have a lot more. But there are a number of concerns, and I note, while we are speaking, that the bill has been considered by a Senate committee and there is a Senate committee report. Some of those concerns are about the process to determine if an occupation is on the relevant skilled occupation list. The bill is silent on that. How quickly, for example, will one be able to change the skilled occupation list to respond to changes in certain occupations?

For example, how will one address geographical skills gaps? We heard the member for Riverina talk before about his experience when he was Deputy Prime Minister. He noticed that there was a big skills gap for mango pickers up in the Northern Territory. I think that's a very good example to show how quickly something like that would be included on the various lists. Also, how will the skilled occupation list cater for different employment needs across regional areas? This, again, is completely unknown. We also need to understand how well Jobs and Skills Australia will function and respond to the needs of the employment market. That, again, is another gap. It's another silence within this legislation.

Of course, importantly, we've been talking about the building and construction sector. What influence will the unions have on shaping the jobs that are listed on the skilled occupation list? For example, will we have the next iteration of the CFMEU limiting the number of builders that are allowed to get a visa so that they can artificially prop up their exorbitant wage demands? Concerns were also raised through the Senate committee process about the minimum income thresholds. I've raised that, particularly with machinists, for example, and the threshold of $137,000. While the intent of this legislation is sound, there are concerns with whether this legislation will in fact result in proper implementation and whether it will in fact address the chronic skills shortage that is in our country.

We do need to fix our migration system. We have seen for 2½ years, since Labor has been in power, an extraordinarily high number of immigrants coming into our country. I have taken the time to talk about the wonderful history and diversity that immigrants have brought to our country, but this government has brought in immigrants, a number of them from war-torn countries, without following proper processes. I include people from Pakistan and Gaza in that. They did not follow the proper processes with those people. So it is very important that this legislation is properly scrutinised and that it addresses reforming the Migration Act and particularly addresses the skills shortage we have in Australia.

Allegra Spender (Wentworth, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Migration Amendment (Strengthening Sponsorship and Nomination Processes) Bill 2024. Introduced back in July, this bill implements several parts of the government's migration strategy. This includes setting index linked salary thresholds for the skills in demand visa, including the specialist skills pathway for those earning at least $135,000, the core skills pathway for those earning at least $70,000 with an occupation on the core skills occupation list and the essential skills pathway for those earning under $70,000 but who work in essential skills occupations.

These are positive changes. They reflect the need for our migration program to focus on bringing the best and the brightest to Australia, to do so in a way that is quicker and simpler for employers and employees alike, to give migrants clearer pathways to permanency and more opportunity to move employers, and to take a risk based approach to preventing exploitation and abuse. These are the kinds of changes that I and many others have called for since before the election, and they will be welcome in Wentworth.

I speak to many people in the technology sector and the venture capital sector and I ask them, 'What are some of the greatest barriers to growing your companies as you want to?' They often tell me, 'Just the skills, and the need to bring people with great experience into Australia to help turbocharge our most innovative companies.' So I think this is a great opportunity here. Similarly, I get many constituents who talk about the challenges of their visa processing times and the amount of uncertainty that comes with long processing times and not knowing how long they have to wait. In some cases, they've chosen to go to other countries or other opportunities or have forgone opportunities because of that uncertainty. So I think the government's commitment to this area is really important.

I'm particularly supportive of the introduction of the specialist skills pathway, which will help fast-track the arrival of the highest skilled and highest earning migrants to Australia. By ditching our outdated occupation list in favour of a simple salary threshold and introducing a seven-day service standard for processing applications, this specialist skills pathway recognises that Australia is in the global talent race and that allowing businesses to quickly and flexibly recruit the migrants they need is central to bringing the best and brightest to Australia. The new pathway recognises that highly skilled migrants are a key contributor to our economic prosperity, helping to accelerate productivity growth, enhancing the skills of the Australians they work alongside and making a significant contribution to public finances. The visa will help Australia attract the engineers we need to transition to a net zero economy, the cyberspecialists we need to help our banking system stay secure and the data scientists we need to harness the potential of AI. With the average permanent skilled migrant contributing almost $200,000 to government budgets over their lifetime, the fiscal dividend is expected to be significant.

However, for the specialist skills pathway to be successful it is critical that this visa stream remain open to all occupations. Whether a migrant works in construction or computing, we want to welcome the best and brightest to our shores when we need them most. That is why I'm so concerned by the government's decision to exclude trade workers, machine operators, drivers and labourers from this visa pathway. The government has not articulated a clear rationale for this decision, and the decision doesn't appear to be aligned with the broader Migration Strategy or the findings of Martin Parkinson's 2023 review. Indeed, there is no clear reason why a sector-agnostic visa pathway based on a high salary threshold is appropriate for every occupation in Australia except those related to construction.

I acknowledge that we need to get the balance right in our migration system but I am deeply concerned that this carve-out has more to do with pressure from interest groups and the CFMEU than it has to do with what is best for our construction sector. When an employer is willing to pay a salary of more than $135,000 plus the associated visa and accreditation fees, there is very low risk that the migrant will displace a domestic worker, and there is very low risk of the worker being subject to exploitation. In the design of the specialist skills pathway, this logic has been accepted by the government for every other sector in the economy, but for some reason the government believes this does not apply to tradies. Instead, this carve-out creates additional hurdles for skilled migrants in construction, increasing the complexity of the overall migration program and effectively creating a two-tier system with different rules for so-called blue-collar and white-collar workers. The Chief Executive Officer of the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Andrew McKellar, said:

These are distinctions that don't fit into the modern economy.

If you clear the salary threshold to enter the high-skilled tier, you should be allowed to apply for the visa. Your occupation should not factor into the equation.

The last thing we need is a system where the highly skilled tradespeople Australia desperately needs are being treated like second-class workers.

The decision to exclude construction workers from the specialist skills pathway comes at a time when we urgently need to expand the construction workforce. Master Builders anticipate that at least half a million workers need to enter the industry by 2029 to maintain business-as-usual construction levels, and an even higher number is required if we're to meet the Housing Accord target of building 1.2 million homes over the next five years and achieve net zero by 2050. Speak to anybody running a building site and they will tell you they are desperate for staff, particularly in highly skilled roles. But, despite the imperative of expanding our construction workforce, the building industry is struggling. According to Master Builders, the sector recruited only around half of the additional workers it needed in the first half of 2024, and new construction apprenticeships actually fell in 2023.

The government has made some welcome commitments to expanding the domestic construction workforce through initiatives such as fee-free TAFE, but we must acknowledge that skilled migrants also have a role to play, just like they have a role to play in building the vibrant economy and society that we enjoy today. This is particularly the case for high-skill, high-earning parts of the building sector. These workers are in short supply in Australia. They are difficult and expensive to recruit and cannot be trained domestically in a short timeframe. Skilled migration is therefore an important tool in making sure Australia has the construction workforce it needs.

While I support this bill, it is clear that the carve-out of construction workers from the specialist skills pathway is unjustified. I urge the government to remove the carve-out of tradies from this visa stream and allow construction workers the same access to this new fast-tracked visa that every other occupation has. If the government is not willing to do this, I urge the government to ensure that tradies across the spectrum are given access to the other skills pathways so that we can get the tradespeople we desperately need into the country and at the speed at which we need them.

I'd like to make two further comments relating both to the bill and to migration more broadly. One of the reasons that I support this bill is that we do need to restructure our migration system. Some of the most heartbreaking cases I get in Wentworth are those of people who have spent many years in Australia going from temporary visa to temporary visa. These people spend up to a decade in this country with the hope of permanent migration. Currently our migration system, through its complexity but also because it hasn't dealt with issues in relation to temporary visa holders, means that we are selling many of these people a lie—the hope of being able to stay in this country when ultimately they can't. So, while I very much support these new pathways the government is providing and the focus on speed, I think we absolutely need to make sure that we can find ways to support the temporary skilled workers that we already have and find ways to make sure that we don't continue to actually bring in people who have an expectation of being able to stay in Australia but ultimately have no real prospect of doing so, because I think we're letting them down.

The second issue I'd like to raise in relation to skills is again the access to these skilled workers, particularly for the hospitality industry. I hear consistently from the hospitality industry that they are really in need of key workers. I know that they have come together in relation to some of these pathways, and I think that is really important because, again, many of these skilled people in the industry have been some of those temporary workers going from temporary visa to temporary visa with no real prospect of permanency despite building deep relationships and making significant contributions to our country.

Finally I would like to briefly talk about aged-care workers. We all recognise in this country that we are in desperate need of healthcare workers and particularly aged-care workers. The government has introduced some pathways, in particular for aged-care workers, but the way in which it has done this troubles me and certainly troubles many of the aged-care companies that I have spoken to in my electorate. The current requirement for the companies to be able to access special pathways to bring in aged-care workers is that they have to sign a pretty onerous MOU with one or a number of unions in the sector regarding the obligations that the union will basically impose on this business.

I accept that unions play an important role in our economy, but, for workplaces which are not already unionised, I find it really concerning that the visa system is being used as a way to drive unionisation or union activity in workplaces and there's no alternative for a workplace and for workers who say: 'We don't want a union focused memorandum of understanding. We would like one working with, for instance, the Fair Work Commission.' We do need to prevent exploitation in our industries and we do need to make sure that we can bring people in, but we need to do this in a way that is appropriate for our workplaces, and I don't think it is appropriate for the unions to have control over which people and which companies are able to bring workers into this country or not. I believe that should certainly be the role of government, not of unions.

James Stevens (Sturt, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Government Waste Reduction) Share this | Link to 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.

Ross Vasta (Bonner, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It being 6.30 pm, the debate is interrupted in accordance with standing order 192B. The debate is adjourned, and the resumption of the debate will be made an order of the day for the next sitting. The member for Sturt will have leave to continue speaking when the debate is resumed on a future date.