Glenn Sterle (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak to the Migration Amendment (Employer Sanctions) Bill 2006. The bill sets out a scheme of sanctions on employers and labour suppliers who knowingly or recklessly engage illegal workers. Labor will support this bill as far as it goes, but the provisions of the bill are seven years late and reek of compromise. The Howard government claims to be concerned about people who seek to work illegally in Australia, but I have my doubts about how genuine that concern is. Despite the supposed concern we hear at election time, the government’s own stated current estimate is that there are around 46,000 visa overstayers in Australia on any given day. After 10 long years of Howard government blather about border security, this admission proves our borders are more porous than ever. So much for, ‘We will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they are here.’

We all know that hollow rhetoric only applies to a handful of terrified people who occasionally venture here in rickety boats, not the illegal workers who fly here to steal Australian jobs and undermine Australian working conditions each and every day. The Howard government proudly boasts about stopping people who come here by boat, but we all know that the biggest threats to Australia’s border security fly into this country—and they steal jobs. How else would these visa overstayers be able to finance their stay unless they were picking up cash work from bosses who turn a blind eye?

The Howard government’s approach to date in dealing with the problem of illegal workers in Australia has been to busy itself, ignoring reports that it has commissioned. The 2000 edition of the Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs’ report on immigration compliance offers an insight into just how irresponsible the Howard government has been in the vital task of protecting Australia’s borders. Chapter 9 of the report relates to the problems of illegal work in Australia. The report says that, during 1999-2000, 2,519 people were found to be working illegally in Australia by department compliance staff. The report also says:

The Minister launched the report of the Review of Illegal Workers in Australia in December 1999. The recommendations included:

- a system of sanctions for those employers and labour suppliers who recruit or refer for employment people without the right to work in Australia, underpinned by a system of administrative warnings.

Here we have a report that is six years old—before Tampa and all the Howard government’s crocodile tears about deciding ‘who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come’—talking about the review that the minister had launched a year earlier.

Just so we are clear: seven long years ago, the Howard government launched a review that recommended that they introduce a system of sanctions for bosses who employ people who have no right to work in Australia, and they have only now gotten around to bringing the matter before the Senate. Yet the slack clowns have the hide to bang on about how responsible they are with Australia’s border security. The Howard government has not just been slack and incompetent in getting this bill to the Senate; they have managed to make a dog’s breakfast of the bill’s content.

Honourable senators will recall that the report of the review of illegal workers in Australia recommended seven long years ago that the Howard government implement:

a system of sanctions for those employers and labour suppliers who recruit—

and the wording is important: employers ‘who recruit’—

people without the right to work in Australia.

The Howard government was left to fill in the details of the circumstances in which an employer who recruits people without the right to work in Australia will be liable for sanctions and the obligations required of employers to take responsible, reasonable steps to look into the right to work of people they recruit. After seven long years, the Howard government has come up with a bill that proposes that offences will only apply where the employer or labour supplier knew the person was an illegal worker or was reckless to that fact.

That is quite different from the approach that has been taken in other countries. It is a weak and gutless approach. It is an approach that is born of a desire to appease crooks. Countries such as Switzerland and Canada have already introduced measures where the threshold test to prosecute bosses who employ illegal workers is merely acting negligently or failing to exercise due diligence in checking work rights. This is a much lower threshold test to ‘knowingly or recklessly’, the one the Howard government has decided to use in this bill. It does not take a genius to work out that with this bill the Howard government is bending over backwards to make it virtually impossible for dodgy bosses who turn a blind eye to illegal workers in order to lower their wage costs to be actually convicted. That is the way of the Howard government: the velvet glove for dodgy bosses and jackboots for workers.

I invite senators to compare the Howard government’s approach to dealing with workers in past bills with the way they deal with bosses in this bill. The Howard government are only too happy to guillotine debate to ram through legislation to impose $30,000 fines on Australian workers who withdraw their labour for one day, but they take seven long years to get around to legislation imposing $13,000 fines on bosses who recklessly employ illegal workers. The Howard government are all too happy to give the Australian Building and Construction Commissioner outrageously undemocratic powers to pursue workers and their representatives. The Howard government legislated to give the commissioner the power to compel workers and union officials to answer questions in an interrogation without the right to silence or protection from self-incrimination under sufferance of six months imprisonment. Six months jail for refusing to dob on your mates but a slap on the wrist for the crooked practices of dodgy bosses in the horticultural industry, for example. That is a clear indication of this government’s priorities and they should be ashamed. Labor will support the bill as it is a small, albeit flawed, step towards dealing with the problem of illegal work in Australia—even if it has taken the Howard government seven long years to get around to it.