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

I am continuing in my comments. After three inquiries, from 2015 to the 2019 inquiry, the Migrant Workers Taskforce, led by Professor Allan Fels, handed down its report, in which it said:

… there are unscrupulous employers in some industries who blatantly breach the law …

It handed down 22 recommendations. That was five years ago. The previous Liberal-National government abandoned many of those recommendations, despite having years in charge to act on them.

Then, in 2021, there was the Senate Select Committee on Job Security, which I chaired. We heard from five courageous workers from Vanuatu and Samoa who had earned as little as $6 an hour picking fruit. As one of them, Sergio, told us:

I came here to work for money. I did not come here as a slave.

We have to extend that inquiry because concerns were raised that workers were punished by their labour hire employer for giving evidence to the Senate.

We on this side have not forgotten the horrific stories that have come out about the treatment of temporary migrants. Under those opposite, our migration system effectively became a caste system, where temporary migrants would come to this country and be freely ripped off, paid below the minimum wage and denied basic rights and protections—and if they complained, they were duly deported. We saw the 7-Eleven scandal, going all the way back to 2016. Pranay Alawala, an international student, was owed more than $30,000 in unpaid wages. When he confronted his boss about the money, the franchisee's lawyer sent him a letter threatening to report him to Immigration for working more than 20 hours per week—a breach of his student visa conditions. Mohammed, a student from India, was paid just $5 an hour at 7-Eleven. When he complained and attempted to resign, he, too, was threatened with deportation. These are just a few of the stories of how shonky employers have exploited vulnerable people in the workplace.

This bill makes it a criminal offence to use a person's migration status to exploit them at work. That means employers threatening temporary migrants with deportation will now be treated as the criminals they really are. This bill enacts recommendation 19 of the Migrant Workers Taskforce, which the Liberal and Nationals were handed five years ago and never acted on. This bill also enacts recommendation 20 of the Migrant Workers Taskforce, which will prohibit employers who exploit workers from engaging more workers on temporary visas. This is absolutely essential to breaking the cycle of exploitation. Again, this was given to the previous government five years ago, and it was never acted on. How many thousands of migrant workers have suffered as a result of their indifference?

Many of these horrific stories have only come to light because of the tireless work of the trade union movement and the services they support, including the Migrant Workers Centre in Victoria and the Visa Assist service in Unions NSW. When people come into this chamber and denigrate unions, this is what they're denigrating: services which have provided a voice to the voiceless; vulnerable people who have come to this country to get an education and to build a better life for their families, and who have been subject to some of the most horrific abuse; migrant workers who have been sexually assaulted by their employers and suffered horrific injuries at work or been jammed into unsafe and unsanitary living conditions.

Last year, Unions NSW brought a delegation of migrant workers into parliament to discuss these issues. I met with two of those workers. One was a woman on a 457 temporary skilled visa who worked as a massage therapist. She was forced to pay her wages to her employer, who also restricted her movement. When she complained, she was threatened with deportation, and threats were made against her family's safety. When she finally escaped her employer, she was in breach of her visa conditions. She came to the union for help.

Likewise, the other person I met here was on a PALM scheme temporary visa, working in fruit picking. He wasn't provided with suitable safety equipment, and one day he sustained an injury that resulted in him partially losing vision in one eye. Then his employer forced him to come back sooner than advised by the doctor, which exacerbated the injury and forced him to get surgery, resulting in the loss of vision becoming worse. As a final insult, his employer then stopped sponsoring his visa, which made it difficult for him to remain in Australia and to get medical treatment which was unavailable in his home country.

These stories are just horrific, but they are out there and they happen far more than you think and to many, many people. As Unions NSW secretary Mark Morey has said:

The current system that was established by the former coalition government … is set up to facilitate ongoing exploitation.

I want to thank the minister for immigration for stepping in and assisting those two workers. As Minister Giles has said:

When migrant workers are being underpaid—it hurts all of us, driving wages and conditions down for everyone …

If not for unions, many of these stories would never have come out. I want to acknowledge the Retail Supply Chain Alliance, the Transport Workers Union and the Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees Association, who have shone a spotlight on these issues in recent years.

The laws introduced in this bill are important, but the fact is that legal protections do not help people if they cannot be enforced. They need to be able to be enforced. A set of laws are just that—something that's proclaimed. It's in a written document. You might even read it on the internet. But what gives it life and breath is the opportunity to turn around and speak out—the opportunity to actually have people who support you when you speak out. That's the critical role that's played by unions. We know that the Fair Work Ombudsman will never and could never have the breadth and resources required to deal with the scale of exploitation of migrant workers. That's why ensuring highly trained and officially registered union officials have the powers needed to inspect compliance with workplace laws is so important.

Right now, in another piece of legislation to come before this chamber, the Fair Work Legislation Amendment (Closing Loopholes No. 2) Bill, there are measures to remove the red tape around unions' right of entry where there is a reasonable suspicion of wage theft. Wage theft impacts migrant workers on an astronomical scale. The final report of the Migrant Workers' Taskforce cited a 2016 survey, which found the following:

of migrant workers—

said they earned $12 per hour or less and 46 per cent said they earned $15 per hour or less …

When wage theft is endemic, we need to cut red tape in order to allow unions to help uncover it—because, when good employers are doing the right thing, they're competing with mongrel employers doing the wrong thing. You have to make sure the playing field is not only justified for business and justified for the workers; it's about fairness within our economy.

There's a reason that the only groups opposing those laws are groups like the National Farmers Federation. It's because some of their members—some of their members—have profited from exploiting and ripping off vulnerable people. But what about the farmers who are doing the right thing? Why should they be undercut by a minority who are mistreating their employees?

I commend these laws and other protections for migrant workers introduced in the protecting worker entitlements bill last year. But, again, these laws will need to be enforced, and unions must play a pivotal role in doing so.

It's not surprising that big business groups like the National Farmers Federation and their lackeys in the Liberal Party and the National Party oppose that concept, because the Liberals and Nationals are always for low pay. At every step, they're always opposed to fair pay, fair conditions and a fair playing field between businesses. They are opposed to horticultural workers being entitled to minimum wage. They refused to implement the recommendations of the Migrant Workers Taskforce for years.

I know a number of the senators on the opposite side and I know they hold very similar values to many Australians on these issues I've raised. So I put to all of those who are in the majority of the Liberal Party and National Party: start holding the values of all Australians. It's so critical. What this bill goes to the heart of and what we were seeing through the job security inquiry that I chaired was that, under the old system, if your employer abused you, if your employer ripped you off, if you left that employer, it was called absconding. In actual fact, some in this chamber will remember two really wonderful missionaries that live and operate in Vanuatu and are Australian citizens operating in Bundaberg. One of those wonderful people is an ex-blackbirded granddaughter of a blackbirded family who turned around and was one of those missionaries. They had people coming to their place after they had been abused and had money stolen from them to get sustenance, to be able to eat and to work out, 'What in the heck do I do?' because they had broken the law by breaking the chain.

Slavery under the old laws, under those existing laws, was identified by the migrant taskforce and also by the job security inquiry. They found a critical need for these laws to be changed. There is a critical need for these new laws to make sure that those fighting for what's right and those who have the strength to turn around and say, 'I'm going to fight for what's right,' have the capacity to turn around and stand up for what's right without having the repercussions of the state, the national government, abusing what should be a human right within this country. Be under no illusion. This is a human rights rectification in the Australian economy. It means that good businesses will have a chance to compete with businesses that have been doing this sort of atrocious exploitation in so many parts of the labour market across the economy.

Too many of those opposite have consistently opposed every measure we've introduced to improve pay, improve job security and close the loopholes some businesses use to undermine our laws and unfairly compete with businesses doing the right thing. Here's a chance not only to do the right thing by passing law into paper, emails and technology. This is an opportunity to empower people in other legislation that complements this to make sure that it's actually a living, breathing document so that next time you abscond you are not absconding; you have a right.