Andrew Bartlett (Queensland, Australian Democrats) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the report of the Joint Standing Committee on Migration, of which I am a member and have been a member ever since I came into this place, I think. The report, which was tabled a month or so ago, is entitled Negotiating the maze: review of arrangements for overseas skills recognition, upgrading and licensing. I have spoken on this before, so I will not take up my full 10 minutes—at least I do not plan to. Once I get started it sometimes can be hard to stop, but I will try not to take up the 10 minutes.

I again want to draw attention to the report, because I think it is an important report. It is a unanimous report that deals with skills in the migration area. Given the contention around that whole area politically at the moment, it is quite an achievement to have a unanimous report on anything to do with skills and migration in the same sentence. For that reason, I think it is a report that is very much worth noting.

I do try to take the opportunity whenever we speak to committee reports, either at this stage on a Thursday evening or at other times during the week, to continually urge the government to do a lot better at responding to committee reports. A lot of work goes into these reports not just from the members and senators and the secretariat but also from the community, who have the expertise and the real world experience of what the pieces of legislation, the policy and the administration of all our laws are like for the people that are subjected to them. They put in all that effort, and we take on board their experiences and expertise and present that to the parliament. The least the government could do is respond. They do not have to agree; but the least they could do is respond much more promptly.

This report has only recently been tabled, so hopefully this will be an example where there is a response within what is supposed to be the required three months—though I would suggest that it would be a very small minority that are responded to within that period of time. The government should respond promptly, particularly when reports are unanimous and particularly when members of all sides—and I put the Democrats as well as the Labor and Liberal members of the committee in this category—have sought to work together to address existing problems and put forward constructive solutions, which is what has been done here.

It is worth emphasising that the area of skills recognition of people overseas—and this includes not only recognition of qualifications but also upgrading and licensing arrangements with regard to those skills—is, by and large, not dealt with by the Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs, which is partly one of the problems, although it cannot be avoided. Skills recognition is often still done on a state-by-state basis in some circumstances with some industries and trades. It is also still done through a whole range of industry bodies, and sometimes that is the best way to do it. There is certainly a lot of heavy involvement from the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations, rather than the Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs—and, again, there is some logic to that. As the title of the report suggests, it is a maze—and it is very hard to negotiate. For people like us, who are connected to the system, it is hard to negotiate; but, for people who want to come here, whether as permanent migrants or temporary residents, the skills area is a maze.

I think we need to recognise it is always going to be difficult and a bit messier than we would like in an ideal world, though that should not stop us from trying to make it better—and I think we should make it better. One of the reasons it is all the more important, and also more difficult, to do that is the massive increase in people coming here under various skilled visas. That is one of the reasons why areas like the 457 visa are, in my view, becoming more contentious—not because of any fundamental problem with the concept but because the numbers coming here have increased so dramatically so quickly.

Here I cite one of the reports we were recently considering—the immigration department annual report, which has only just been tabled—and note the increases in this area. The number of people who entered Australia through the permanent skilled stream in the last financial year increased from 77,880 to 97,340. That is an increase of 25 per cent in one year in the number of people coming through the permanent skilled stream, which is not on 457 visas, I might say; that is in areas like skilled independent, employer sponsored, state and territory sponsored, skilled Australian sponsored, business skills visas and distinguished talent visas, almost all of which involve issues to do with skills recognition.

On top of the nearly 100,000 arrivals in the last financial year, we have the temporary resident area, which is where the skilled 457 class comes in. The number of visas issued by category in the skilled visa classes has increased in the last financial year from 55,600 to 74,600, a change of 34 per cent. If you go back a year, it went from 48,000 to 55,600. So in one year we have had increases of 25 per cent in the permanent area and 34 per cent in the temporary skilled area. As is noted with regard to the 457 visas sponsored area, there is a performance measure that 100 per cent of 457 visa sponsors are monitored for compliance with their visa conditions. The goal of 100 per cent was met two years ago—they checked the lot of them. The following year it was 96.6 per cent—a bit of a worry but not too bad. In the last financial year 65 per cent were checked—less than two-thirds of the people who came here on 457 visas were actually monitored to see if they complied with their visas.

I believe that is the core problem: we do not have the resources in the department to adequately deal with compliance. The government has talked a lot about compliance in the migration area with regard to people who come here under other circumstances but is letting in 20,000 or 30,000 extra people a year—which I do not oppose, let me emphasise. I support it if it is done in a way where the regulatory regime around it is able to be properly monitored and complied with. That is the problem. When the problems outlined in the core report I am talking about here come into play as well, that is magnified. People might still get here, but then there are all of the difficulties of having their skills adequately recognised.

By way of a final comment, I would mention what it means with regard to the culture of the area. In recent years the immigration department and the minister have notoriously acknowledged that the culture of the department went bad. Things went bad. Not just the laws—although I have been very critical of those—but also the culture surrounding the administration went bad. I think that is a valid issue when looked at against the workplace changes. It is not just what is in workplace laws—we all have views about that, of course; they are different on all sides—it is the signals that are sent to people in the community that the culture has changed. That is another example of where some people in the community may have got the mistaken message that, because of the political debate surrounding things, workplace culture has changed so it is now okay to try and exploit people and see what you can get away with. That is all the more reason to do better with compliance; that is why it is important.