Pauline Hanson (Queensland, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) Share this | Hansard source

Well, I'm gobsmacked again. I cannot believe the response to this urgency motion to question jobs in Australia that international students may be taking from Australians. I won't deny international students bring a lot of income—actually the third-highest income into Australia, by all means. The Department of Immigration and Border Protection granted 343,035 international student visas in 2016-17, and these visa types are growing at a rate of 10 per cent a year.

I have to say, in relation to a lot of these universities in Melbourne and Sydney, that I was at a meeting just recently and a student from down in Melbourne got up and was talking to me and she was actually crying. She said, 'I feel like a foreigner in my own university.' That's what she said, with no prompting—nothing. She wasn't the only one; another one said that to me. So this is actually how they're feeling in their own universities; they're feeling like foreigners in their own universities.

The vast majority of these international student visas have a work right of up to 40 hours a fortnight during the term and unlimited work rights at other times. Let me repeat that: unlimited work rights at other times. When they get the visas to come into the country they should prove that they are self-funding—that they really don't need to work. And it's true: we estimate that about 30 to 50 per cent of the international students with a work right do work. But it's ridiculous that no-one in government knows which students work, how much they work, where they work or whether they report their earnings to the ATO. So are we getting tax from them? Who knows? We don't know that.

What we are saying is that at the point in time they are granted visas to Australia, those foreign students should be applying and getting a TFN so that when they go to work we know what income they're making and that they pay taxes in this country. The whole fact is that if we have changed to having backpackers pay tax from the first dollar they earn, and at 15 per cent, why shouldn't international students do exactly the same thing instead of just being out there taking the jobs? This is the case.

These questions could be answered if the government routinely linked administrative data and cross-matched it with census data. We know from a study published this year, based on the 2011 census, that international students are employed predominantly in 10 occupations: hospitality; cleaners and laundry workers; sales assistants; food preparation assistants; food trade workers; personal carers; checkout operators; tertiary education teachers; automobile, bus and rail drivers; and packers and product assemblers. They don't need education; there are a lot of people out there who can do those jobs. These occupations are predominantly lower-skill jobs which could be done by Australians—in particular, by young unemployed Australians.

Listen to the Labor Party, who is supposed to be for the worker. Yes, they parade their unions around and say that the unions are fighting for the rights of the workers and all the rest of it, but what about the rights of the youth and unemployed? What about them? Why aren't they addressing that? It is One Nation with an apprenticeship policy: in the first year the government pays 75 per cent of the wage, in the second year it pays 50 per cent of the wage and in the third year it pays 25 per cent of the wage. Let's get apprenticeship schemes going in this country.