Tony Sheldon (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

[by video link] I rise to speak on the Customs Amendment (Banning Goods Produced By Forced Labour) Bill 2021. I thank Senator Patrick for introducing this private member's bill. It is a bill that Labor supports.

It should not be controversial to stamp out the use of slavery and forced labour in Australia and around the world. Slavery has not been relegated to the history books. It is a blight that countries around the world too often see to this very day. As we speak, there are more than 40 million people around the world who have been coerced and forced into slavery-like conditions.

Some have promoted the lie that slavery is not part of our own history in Australia: 'There was no slavery in Australia.' The person I'm quoting, of course, is the Prime Minister, Mr Morrison, on ABC Radio just one year ago. When Morrison said slavery had not existed in Australia, he was covering up the exploitation of more than 62,000 South Sea islanders—people from Vanuatu, the Solomon Islands, New Caledonia, Papua New Guinea, Tuvalu, Kiribati and Fiji. More than 62,000 South Sea islanders were forcibly brought to Australia. More than 62,000 South Sea islanders were kidnapped, tricked, coerced or threatened into coming to Australia, where they were forced to work as slaves on cane fields in Northern Queensland. That shameful practice is known as blackbirding. While it started in the 1840s, it continued until it became illegal in the early 1900s. That's almost 40 years after the Thirteenth Amendment made slavery illegal in the United States. When it was finally made illegal, there were no repatriations. In fact, thousands were deported, often to the wrong islands, where they had no family and no connections and may not have spoken the local language. The fact that the Prime Minister of Australia was unaware of this practice is a national embarrassment.

There is also the well-documented practice of Indigenous workers being bought and sold as chattels, particularly in the northern Australian pastoral industry. The purchase and sale of Indigenous workers and forced labour without pay reportedly continued as recently as the 1950s. Again, the fact the Prime Minister of Australia was unaware of this practice is incomprehensible.

While the open and flagrant use of slavery and forced labour has, thankfully, been stamped out, it is something that continues in Australia in the shadows. Make no mistake: there is slavery and forced labour in Australia today. The 2018 Global Slavery Index estimates there are at least 15,000 slaves in Australia. The use of slavery in Australia today is particularly high in the agricultural sector, and it's also present in construction, domestic work, meat processing, cleaning, hospitality and food services. These are all essential industries, and they are being driven in part by slavery. Many of those 15,000 slaves in Australia today are migrants on temporary visas who were forced into slavery by the threat of deportation by their employer.

In 2013, the Fair Work Ombudsman launched its Harvest Trail investigation. Of the 638 horticulture businesses and labour hire companies it investigated, more than half were breaking labour laws, including workers being placed into piecework arrangements which resulted in them being paid substantially below the Australian minimum wage. A few years later, the Ombudsman went back and re-investigated 245 of those businesses. Of the 245, 162 had disappeared and may now be phoenixing. Of those that were still operating, almost half were still breaking labour laws. So, even after getting caught the first time, they were reoffending. At budget estimates, we asked the Fair Work Ombudsman if they were going to check on those repeat offenders a third time; they said no. This isn't a criticism of the Fair Work Ombudsman; they just do not have the resources to enforce labour laws around this country. They do not have the resources to stamp out modern slavery in Australia.

The only organisations that do have the scale and expertise required are trade unions. But the Morrison government is so ideologically opposed to the trade union movement that it will never in a million years give a qualified union representative the power to check that people are being paid what they are legally entitled to.

Instead, we had another inquiry in 2019, the Migrant Workers Taskforce, which also found slavery-like conditions in Australia, particularly at shonky labour-hire companies. One of the key recommendations was to establish a national labour-hire registration scheme. It would focus on four high-risk sectors: horticulture, meat processing, cleaning and security—sectors where the 15,000 slaves in Australia today are most likely to be working. That report was over two years ago, and the Morrison government has still not introduced this scheme. We can be sure Mr Morrison has no intention of introducing that scheme before the end of this parliament's term.

Then there is the gig economy, which the Morrison government has still done nothing to regulate, when Uber workers are dying on the roads for as little as $6.67 an hour, with no paid leave, no workers compensation and no alternative options in Mr Morrison's economy—and, if you die at work, Uber will not even contact your family. Uber is now the second-largest employer in Australia. This is the future of work that Mr Morrison envisages for all Australians—a return to slave-like conditions.

Just today, Uber announced a new partnership with the largest employer in Australia, Woolworths, to begin same-hour grocery deliveries. We now have the two largest employers in Australia teaming up to exploit workers. My question for Woolworths is this: What steps are you taking to ensure the Uber workers you're using aren't being paid $6.67 an hour? What steps are you taking, Woolworths, to ensure that Uber riders delivering your goods have a safe working environment? Just last week, it was revealed that Uber failed to report 500 incidents, including sexual assault and serious accidents. And this is the company that you, Woolworths, are now working with. As the economic employer of those Uber drivers now delivering your products, Woolworths—the people at the top of the supply chain—you owe those riders in the supply chain a duty of care.

The Senate Select Committee on Job Security has heard about forced labour taking place on mine sites in Western Australia. Electricians have provided evidence that they are lured to a remote mine site at one rate of pay and, once they arrive, they are told they can either take the work for a lower rate of pay or they can wait for a week, without pay, until the next flight. That fits the very definition of forced labour. So slavery and forced labour continue on farms, at Uber, at mine sites and in other workplaces around Australia because Mr Morrison doesn't think that slavery ever existed in Australia, let alone that it exists today under his own prime ministership.

I want to commend the Australian Workers Union and Unions NSW for leading the charge in exposing modern slavery on Australian farms. Unions NSW recently released a report with the Migrant Workers Centre entitled Working for $9 a day. It found workers on farms earning less than $1 an hour on piece rates, with some working 20 hours per day. Earlier this year, I met one of those workers, a Taiwanese woman called Kate. Kate was receiving $4 an hour to pick oranges on a farm in southern Australia and was eating out of a bin to survive. At one farm, Kate was sexually harassed and told she would have to put up with it if she wanted to keep her job.

The Australian Workers Union is seeking to introduce through the Fair Work Commission a minimum wage for fruit pickers to bring an end to slavery on Australian farms. If Mr Morrison had any interest in addressing slavery on his watch, he would support the Australian Workers Union in that case. In fact, if Mr Morrison was interested in fighting slavery, there is a long list of things he could do. The only progress that has been made on modern slavery in the last eight years of this government has been the result of massive pressure by the Labor Party, the trade union movement and civil rights groups.

In 2017, Labor announced it would introduce modern slavery legislation if it won the next election. Twelve months later, the Morrison government introduced the Modern Slavery Bill 2018. It was a pale imitation of the legislation proposed by Labor. As we've seen so often with Mr Morrison, he takes a Labor idea and waters it down just enough to prevent it from being good policy, just as we saw with JobKeeper, with rorts by the likes of Gerry Harvey—no action. Labor moved amendments to the Modern Slavery Bill to improve its effectiveness, introduce penalties for noncompliance and establish an Independent Anti-Slavery Commissioner. Unfortunately the Liberal government rejected those amendments.

Labor again calls on the Morrison government to work with Labor and the crossbench to amend the Modern Slavery Act to introduce penalties for noncompliance and to require mandatory reporting on exposure to specific issues of pressing concern such as Uighur forced labour. Until then, Australia remains well behind many of the global partners in addressing slavery and forced labour. Australia still has not ratified the International Labour Organization's 2014 forced labour protocol. If the Morrison government wants to speak with any global credibility on ending forced labour, it should join the other 45 countries, including New Zealand, the UK, Canada and Germany, and fully ratify the ILO Forced Labour Convention. Instead, we have a modern slavery reporting system that has been treated as a joke by big businesses in Australia.

Research from the Australian Council of Superannuation Investors in June found that a majority of the ASX 200 companies were treating it as a tick-the-box exercise and were only disclosing the absolute bare minimum about slavery in their supply chain. A third of ASX 200 companies were potentially noncompliant. In fact, not a single company in the first year of the scheme has reported a single modern slavery incident, even when they have identified red flags such as passports being seized, wage theft, forced overtime or recruitment fees being charged to workers. The fact is that Mr Morrison's watered-down slavery laws have turned this into a box-ticking exercise.

In the meantime, the world is witnessing a growing number of horrifying reports of forced slavery and human rights violations in China. According to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute 2020 report titled Uyghurs for sale, more than 80,000 Uighurs were transferred out of Xinjiang to work in factories across China between 2017 and 2019. Those workers typically live in segregated dormitories, undergo organised Mandarin ideological training, are subject to constant surveillance and of course are forbidden from participating in religious observances. The Uyghurs for sale report identified 27 factories across nine Chinese provinces that are using Uighur labour transferred from Xinjiang. These factories claim to be part of the supply chain of 82 high-profile brands.

If your company is profiting from forced labour or slavery, it is your responsibility to stamp it out, so I call on the following companies identified by the Strategic Policy Institute to implement the appropriate slavery policies so that they are transparently avoiding human exploitation and misery at their advantage. They are companies like Amazon, Google, Huawei, Calvin Klein, Skechers, Zara, H&M, BMW, Jaguar, Land Rover, Mercedes-Benz, Volkswagen, Levi's, Walmart, Costco, Adidas and Nike. Martin Luther King once said, 'Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.' If those companies continue to profit from gross injustice, and the Morrison government continues to allow them to do so, it is not just the Uighurs who suffer; it brings down rights and conditions for workers around the world, including here in Australia.

So Labor supports this bill. We call on the Morrison government to ratify the ILO Forced Labour Convention. We call on the Morrison government to publish an annual list of countries, regions, industries and products with a high risk of modern slavery and forced labour. We call for an Independent Anti-Slavery Commissioner. We call for penalties for companies who are noncompliant. We call for targeted sanctions on foreign companies, officials and other entities known to be directly profiteering from forced labour. And we call on the Morrison government to lead by example and conduct a comprehensive review of its own procurement and supply chains.