Dean Smith (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is, and there is more, Senator Macdonald. It is hard to believe, but there is more:

The Daily Telegraph can reveal more than 850 Chinese nationals were given the green light to work at the Sino Iron Project on 457 visas between 2008 and 2013.

At its peak there were 374 people on 457 visas working on the mine with 372 of them Chinese.

MCC Mining (WA) Pty Ltd … was contracted by CITIC Pacific to undertake the procurement for the site.

Opposition Leader Bill Shorten was employment minister during a portion of the period when the 457 visas were approved—

at the expense of Australian workers. If you were generous, Senator Macdonald, you might well think that is an isolated incident—a one-off. If you were being generous, you would have been too generous because only the day before in The Daily Telegraph it says under the heading, 'Shorten's foreign visa policy is fried', that Shorten—that is, the Leader of the Opposition, Mr Bill Shorten—is attempting to whip up some kind of foreign worker backlash by acting tough on people arriving here on 457 visas. It goes on to say that it emerges that Labor's previous Gillard government, in which Shorten was workplace minister, oversaw a huge increase in the number of foreign workers' 457 visas which were extended even to those working at the likes of McDonald's, KFC and Hungry Jack's.

It is not my place to lecture the modern Labor Party about its industrial relations history, but what is shameful is that the modern Labor Party has drifted so far away—I do not mind; I am big enough to say this—from its foundations and its legacy of genuinely looking after workers' interests and rights. They should be ashamed of themselves.