Anne McEwen (SA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I also rise to take note of answers given by Minister Vanstone, the Minister for Immigration and Multicultural Affairs, to the numerous questions asked of her today about the use and misuse of 457 visas—a whole lot of answers which again clearly demonstrated that the government has watched over an explosion in the number of people being brought into this country to work while at the same time it has overseen the vandalisation of our education system, a system that has been so neglected it has failed to deliver the skilled workers we need in Australia. The minister huffs and puffs and carries on with breathtaking hypocrisy about xenophobia, but she cannot hide the facts that, under 10 years of this government, 270,000 people have been brought into this country to work and 300,000 people have been turned away from TAFE colleges. Just today we saw in the paper that university degrees are now costing somewhere in the order of $200,000, despite the Prime Minister’s promise that he would not allow the cost of degrees to rise to $100,000. What a great way for our young people to start their working career: with a university HECS debt as big as their mortgage—if they can afford a mortgage.

And I have to ask: how are those Australian technical colleges going? I drove past one proposed site for an ATC—which, coincidentally, was in the marginal Liberal seat of Kingston in my state—on the weekend, and it looked pretty empty to me. In fact, it was so empty that it did not have any windows or doors; it was just an empty shell of a building with a nice sign out the front. But you can bet your last dollar, Mr Deputy President, that that ATC will be up and running some time before the next federal election, and no doubt it will be opened with a lot of fanfare by the Prime Minister and the member for Kingston. I bet that will be a priority for the government—but clearly the skills shortages in Australia are not, and addressing them by improving funding to our education system is not.

I do not think the misuse and abuse of the 457 visa system is a priority for the government either. We have heard that demonstrated today in the answer to my question about the investigation by the department of T&R Pastoral. Five months later, we are still waiting for a report. Five months later—when the minister promised us that this was an urgent matter and that she was going to investigate it and have something done about it—we are still waiting for a report.

We also heard answers today in response to facts that we discovered on the departmental website about the so-called skilled people being brought into this country to do jobs: waiters, domestic housekeepers and sales assistants, 2,720 elementary clerical workers over last three years and, of course, the infamous 25 caravan park attendants. Forgive me, I have spent a lot of time in caravan parks; I holiday in them often but, with due respect to caravan park attendants, I do not know what particular skills they have that need us to import these kinds of workers from overseas. How do we really know if we need to import caravan park attendants or those with any other kind of occupation when employers are not required to first demonstrate that they have sought to fill those positions with local workers?

What about our responsibilities to those people who come here under the 457 visa program? What responsibilities do the government have to ensure those people are not exploited by unscrupulous employers? They do nothing until the Labor Party and the unions raise all these issues of exploitation. It was the Labor Party and the unions who raised the issue of exploitation of Canberra workers. It was the Labor Party and the unions who raised the issue of exploitation of people in South Australia. But it was the minister herself who confirmed that the 457 visa program could be used for exploitation of workers when she infamously said:

… it opens up the industry to other pools of employees, which undermines the unions’ ability to exploit high wages amid the skills shortage …

She actually admitted it. She admitted that the visa program can be used to drive down wages, to keep wages low in this country, to turn us into another America, to turn us into another country of low-wage workers. She has not denied it and she did not deny it today. All we get from this minister is more bluster and bluff about—(Time expired)

Question agreed to.