George Campbell (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I must say, that was an incredible contribution by Senator Humphries. He is in fairyland. We on this side of the chamber have not said that every employer who is bringing employees in on 457 visas is seeking to rort the system. There are a lot of employers legitimately bringing people in to meet genuine skills shortages. The New South Wales government has been doing it with nurses. It has been paying them under the same rates and conditions as other nurses in the health industry. That is fine. There is not a problem with that. But, Senator Humphries, there is indisputable evidence that there are employers bringing people into this country on 457 visas and using and exploiting them. They are using them as cheap labour and employing them in circumstances where it is disadvantaging Australian workers.

Let us take the example of ABC Tissues; a question was asked of the minister about this in question time today. ABC Tissues brought workers in from China to install equipment in the tissue plant that is being constructed in Wetherill Park. There was labour available in this country to undertake that work. There was a company 20 minutes from the site in Wetherill Park that had installed similar equipment for the ABC Tissues company in Queensland, and whose employees had sought the contract at Wetherill Park. They did not get it. They wanted it but, instead, the company organised, through a Chinese labour hire company, to provide the labour out of China. This was brought to the attention of ABC Tissues, and was raised with the minister in a letter written on 23 May, which set out the concerns the union had with what was occurring on that site. I will only read a part of it, but the letter said:

The first matter is the exploitation of guest workers in terms of their occupational health and safety and related issues. The second issue is the fact of guest workers’ inferior wages and conditions being used as a means of undermining the wages and conditions of local workers, who were denied the contract despite the fact they had done similar work for the company on a previous site built in Queensland.

So it was drawn to the minister’s attention on 23 May. The company eventually got a meeting with the department on 23 June—it took a month to get a meeting with the department to discuss the issue! At that meeting, the circumstances of the case were again run across the department, but the case did not surface as an issue until August; the department had done nothing in the interceding month.

And what happened when there were inspections on the ABC Tissue site at Wetherill Park? What did they actually find, Senator Humphries? They found that workers were working on the roof, 15 metres in the air, with no safety rail and with no safety equipment whatsoever. They found that there were unqualified electricians handling exposed cables. They found that welders were wearing completely inadequate safety glasses. They found that there was handling of hydrochloric acid with no safety gear. They found that tools and equipment did not meet Australian standards. They found that there were no signs in Chinese on the site, despite the fact that the Chinese workers did not speak English. WorkCover said that those workers needed supervision at all times. The crowning glory was that there was one woman to interpret for all of the Chinese workers on the site, and she had to carry out administrative duties at the same time. The Labor Party are not blaming the workers, but it is obvious—