Joe Ludwig (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Manager of Opposition Business in the Senate) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That item 2 [Division 1.4E—Sponsorship: trade skills training (incorporating Subdivisions 1.4E.1 to 1.4E.4)] of Schedule 7 of the Migration Amendment Regulations 2005 (No. 9), as contained in Select Legislative Instrument 2005 No. 240 and made under the Migration Act 1958, be disallowed.

Schedule 7 of the Migration Amendment Regulations 2005 (No. 9) is the government’s new trade skills training visa—at least, it was in November. However, I did note from today’s Australian that Senator Vanstone intends to cut back skilled visas—so there is obviously a new one, but it may be overtaken shortly by another plan that Senator Vanstone is hatching in the skills area. I think it only indicates that skills training in Australia is being planned by Senator Vanstone. Senator Vanstone is the Minister for Immigration and Multicultural Affairs, not the minister for training or for trade skills—or for education, for that matter. I might allude to this later in this contribution.

The trade skills training visa will, according to the government, allow noncitizens ‘to undertake apprenticeships in regional areas of Australia in trade occupations experiencing skills shortages where no Australian has been found to fill the position’. In reality, however, this regulation is another attempt by the Howard government to apply yet another bandaid to Australia’s skills shortage—a skills shortage all of the government’s own making. The Howard government has failed to adequately train Australians and instead has continued to turn to the option of importing skills. We all know we have a skills shortage in Australia and in some areas it is, indeed, at crisis point. However, it is not a recent phenomenon. It did not happen last year or this year; you can at least trace its early signs, I think, back to when this government got into office in 1996 and started slashing spending on training and education—particularly vocational education and training.

Skills shortages in the medium to long term are best addressed through education and training initiatives. Since 1996, however, TAFE, other vocational education and training, and university funding have declined while skilled migration has increased. During a skills shortage—this is a little bit staggering, really—under this federal government, education and training have declined and skilled migration has increased. It has been a long-term failure by this government is to invest in our own people. This is not a policy that will take Australia into the future. It is not about building Australia for the future. This government is looking for a short-term political fix. This government has been critical of Labor for expressing so much alarm at the cuts to Commonwealth funding of universities. It has even claimed that the Labor Party, which established TAFE, has no interest in apprenticeships. I can say that I do have a vital interest in apprenticeships. I was up in Toowoomba on Friday supporting Kim Beazley’s plan for no TAFE fees for apprentices. It is a good initiative; it is a pity the government has not got an initiative equal to it.

When you look at the government’s policies on universities, however, turning thousands of qualified students away from universities does not miraculously increase the numbers of those seeking to learn a trade. The government does not seem to understand that there are different markets—particularly if you have cut funding to TAFE at the same time. Quite simply, this government has failed, for quite a long time now, to turn its mind to training Australians in TAFE courses and trade courses and to encouraging them to go to university—in other words, this is right across the board. This government’s reliance on skilled migration to address the skills shortage has itself failed. This government is now importing unskilled workers and getting Australian businesses to train them. This government does not understand the problem.

There are two basic impacts of a skills shortage. One seems blatantly obvious to me—I think the government should see it as well, but they have certainly demonstrated no inclination to understand it: that business cannot get the people they need. That is one; it is quite simple. The second is that there is the potential for wages growth in those certain occupations where there is a shortage, without there being any increase in productivity. The net effect is that it costs business more; it can lead to increased costs to business. It costs consumers more because businesses will endeavour to pass those costs on, and it can have an inflationary impact. These are the downsides; if you have a skills shortage and you do not look at the long-term needs, then you can quickly get yourself into a position where those issues start to hurt small and medium sized business.

But let us not downplay skilled migration. Skilled migration is a valuable component of Australia’s cultural and economic development, but it should not be a primary means of addressing our skills shortage. It should not be the only policy left. Senator Vanstone is starting to look more like the minister for vocational education and training than like the immigration minister, but that is not the main way you are going to address and deliver adequately skilled labour to this country. It is clear that there is a skills shortage, but it is not an immigration issue. This government is using immigration, but it can only be a bandaid. The government is treating the skills shortage as an immigration problem, as I said. It is moving the debate over there. This government is good at that—at shifting the debate away from where it really is. The debate is about skills shortage in this country, not about using migration to fill that void. The skills shortage is not an immigration problem; it is actually an education priority. That is where this government’s mind and work should be.

So we can ask whether Senator Vanstone is the only one in charge of fixing the problem. She is not here in the chamber, but I am sure the news will be passed on to her that it seems that she is the only one seeking to fix the problem of skills shortages in Australia. That is in itself the real question: why is the immigration minister leading the government’s campaign to address the skills crisis in Australia? We know that the Treasurer, Mr Peter Costello, is pleased with this approach. Training is long term; it takes time, resources, commitment and money. Those words—time, commitment and money—do not sit well with the Treasurer. Without significant investment in education and training, however, the skills shortage will become a permanent feature of our economy. Many of the occupations on the in-demand list for skilled migration have been on the list for almost a decade. If you want to see how bad this government’s neglect has been, have a look at the migration occupations in demand list for professions and trades from 1999 to 2005. In 1999 there were five trades and vocational occupations on the list. In 2002 there were three. And in 2005 there were 27 trades on the migration occupations in demand list. That trend looks like continuing through 2006.

Now the Howard government wants to import unskilled labour under a skilled migration program—has it really got that bad? Clearly, investment in domestic training has been woefully inadequate. The Liberal Party and National Party—I will keep referring to those separately because the coalition is starting to fray and they might want me to use the two different names—have been hoarding taxpayers’ money and refusing to invest in skills, and they need to start to address this with policy initiatives. We know that employers prefer to train people from their regional area in order to help the community build and grow. Those people stay as tradespeople in the community and commit to long-term investment in the area. That is how rural communities have lived and supported themselves over many years. This government, of course, is abandoning rural voters. It is abandoning rural areas and saying, ‘There is a skills shortage in rural communities and we are going to fix that by skilled migration,’ rather than investing in those communities with training and education opportunities for the young people in those areas—and not only the young people but also the 18- to 35-year-olds, the people who can be retrained and helped back into the labour market.

Instead, in 2004, the number of apprentices and trainees enrolling took a four per cent hit and the number of students enrolled in VET took a seven per cent hit. So what is the government doing to address that? Very little. The result is, firstly, that we are now turning to overseas fee-paying students to meet the government’s skilled migration program and, secondly, we are getting a new visa class to support the use of unskilled apprentices—unskilled, untrained labour—under a skilled migration program. The bulk of the government’s skilled migration program includes overseas fee-paying students and unskilled, untrained foreign nationals. That seems to be the policy initiative that this government is pursuing. It should turn itself to how it can effectively help regional and rural Australia rather than pursue the course it has set.

There are two significant problems with this visa. The first relates to the fact that the apprenticeship is less likely to contribute to Australia’s skilled workforce in the long term than if you trained people from a rural and regional area. A person who completes their apprenticeship under the trade skills training visa is more likely to take that skill away from that regional and rural community to a capital city or offshore. The skill would then be an export from Australia rather than an import to it. The second problem is that the trade skills training visa is simply another avenue for those seeking to immigrate to Australia to obtain a visa. That is not a bad thing. This is a great country and we always encourage people to come to Australia. But the argument is about committing and investing in regional and rural Australia to ensure that people in those regions get the opportunity to train and work in those communities—because that is what they want to do. Neither of these two problems are part of that, and nor is the government investing in them. In each case, it is going to make it in any instance harder for people to obtain apprenticeships and remain in rural areas. This visa will drag people from overseas into regional and rural apprenticeships, which could be at the sake of young and not so young people in the community having that opportunity themselves.

The government claims that its trade skills training visa requires a potential employer to demonstrate that there are no local people prepared to take the job. I have to say, that is hard to accept when nowhere among the 50 questions on the employers’ application form does it require them to have even advertised the job. It is pretty basic that you might want to require them to advertise it to make sure that, in the first place, it is well known that there is in fact a job there. You have not exhausted all avenues when you have not even taken the time to advertise in a local newspaper that you have vacancies for apprenticeships. In the meantime, businesses are being forced to fill the skills gap with short-term measures.

As a nation, we must look beyond short-term fixes like skilled migration. They are part of but not the solution. They cannot replace the competitive advantage of training our own young people from rural and regional areas to work in those areas. Labor’s concern is simple: under this federal government we are importing our present and future requirements rather than training our own. The government’s answer of importing unskilled labour under a skilled migration program is not sound skills planning. It is not sound immigration planning and it is not sound population planning either. Unfortunately, with its new trade skills training visa, the government is undermining the competitive advantage we really have. This government needs to understand that sound policy is much more than an announcement.

Going back to Senator Vanstone, she is floating her new ideas again. The plan seems to be to cut back skills visas, which goes to considering measures to cut the number of less-skilled technology workers entering Australia. That is based not on work by the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations but, it appears, because the minister disagreed with them, on data generated from within her own department, which she commissioned. It seems that sometimes you might commission a report because you disagree with the area that might be actually trying to help with and work through the issue. One can see provided in that a worrisome example of short-term fixes for what are really long-term problems that need to be addressed. And the best time to start addressing those is now.

Nigel Scullion (NT, Country Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the disallowance of item 2, schedule 7 of the Migration Amendment Regulations 2005 (No. 9). I would like to commend, as I usually do, Senator Ludwig, my colleague from the other side, for an excellent contribution—though it is unfortunate that the issues that were left out of his contribution were more significant than the issues covered in it. He made reference to the Treasurer and said that the Treasurer is somehow to blame for this situation, and I have to say that our Treasurer would probably agree with him. An interesting consequence of having a good economy and good growth is that it causes low unemployment—fewer available people to turn up for jobs. That is a consequence of having a good, strong economy, an economy that is sustainable in terms of growth. Of course, the senator opposite is right: that has been happening since 1996—and the government takes full blame for having a strong and growing economy. But, of course, there are consequences. As the senator opposite has pointed out, there is now a skills shortage. We can call it a skills shortage or a jobs dearth. There are different ways that you can look at it.

The comments the senator opposite made with regard to regional and rural Australia were interesting. I represent, as does the senator opposite, plenty of places in regional and rural Australia. I think regional and rural Australia has every right to share in this growth and this opportunity. This particular aspect of the migration program, the trade skills training visa, is targeted particularly at regional Australia, because those issues are particularly acute there. The senator opposite would recognise that regional and rural Australia do have the right—as do other Australians—to share in the growth in our economy and the benefits that spring from that.

It is interesting that Senator Ludwig indicated that Amanda Vanstone is now the minister for vocational education and training. I can assure Senator Ludwig that this area is not unlike any of the other issues in this government, and we have to deal with a suite of complex issues: the answer is never in a single bolt of lightning. These are very serious issues, and the government takes them very seriously in ensuring that there is equitable growth in each of the portfolios to ensure that all of Australia shares in the growth. Obviously, it is not only about vocational educational and training, investments we have made in universities or the recent investment we made in the TAFE colleges in Australia; clearly, there is a need right now for this growth to be sustainable—and it is; people have confidence in that. Particularly in regional areas, if there is not an answer found to this in the short term, there simply will not be that sustained growth and, frankly, regional Australia will miss out—and I do not think that is good enough.

Interestingly, the Australian of 15 April last year quoted ACTU President Sharan Burrow as saying:

She did not oppose fee-paying overseas students taking up apprentices in regional Australia “as long as it was not at the expense of local students getting their opportunities”.

So, in a lot of ways, she has reflected the view of the senator opposite, Senator Ludwig, in saying, quite sensibly, that there are some concerns; that we do not mind the benefits of such a sensible policy but we need to ensure that there is a policy framework behind that to ensure that there are no unintended consequences and that local people do not miss out on opportunities. I would like to assure this chamber that this is a government that thinks through in a very comprehensive sense every possible scenario with respect to these issues—and we spend a lot of time doing so.

I can assure this place that our policy framework ensures that no suitable Australian will miss out on an apprenticeship position because of an overseas apprentice. That is not just a statement: before an overseas apprentice can fill a vacancy, an approved regional certifying body, an RCB, must certify that no Australian apprentice can be found to fill that vacancy. That is a fact. From recollection, I think there are nine current applications, one of which has been approved and one which was seen to be invalid. It is not appropriate that I talk about the details of those applications, but one would assume that the validity or otherwise of that was simply that they found an apprentice for that particular task. It has to be demonstrated that there is no-one there who can fill that role as an apprentice.

I can assure this place—and I am quite sure that I do not have to give too many assurances to those senators who get around in regional and rural Australia—that this is a real issue in a number of places in Central Queensland and in the places I visited during the break. There is a mine near Borroloola which has spent quite a lot of money recruiting bodies and putting advertisements in the Australian. When they need tradespeople, there is a huge competition for them and it is very difficult to get them.

The approved regional certifying bodies have to certify that no Australian apprentice can be found to fill the vacancy. I know from personal experience that that is the case in many areas of regional and rural Australia. In Roma in Queensland, in Senator Bartlett’s area, Golden West Employment Solutions had a sponsorship application that was approved in December last year. I understand that they employ 413 people. That is not an insignificant number; it is a very serious number. Unfortunately, they have 188 vacancies. That is in Central Australia—in regional Australia. They have 188 vacant positions. Senator Ludwig, I accept some of your criticisms—and it would be great to have more apprentices. We have incentives to provide for that, but it is about the speed at which these things can happen so that places like Roma and Central Queensland and other areas can get the benefits of our growing economy—and filling 188 vacant positions is not going to just happen overnight. This need we have to meet is not on an exponential growth curve, but it is very steep.

The government’s analysis is that we need to provide extra people in these positions through a migration program. I would remind Senator Ludwig that this is not a one-off line; this is part of a comprehensive approach to our migration program. In the 2005-06 budget there was an increase of some 20,000 skilled places. So we have already recognised that there are quite a lot of areas where we cannot meet the demand of the workplace. We have seasonal harvest workers, who basically increase the flexibility of holidaymakers; we have the trade skills training visa, which we are discussing here today; we have the industry outpost positions; and we have the two-staged skilled designated area sponsored visa. It is quite a comprehensive part of the migration program.

I have to say that we have developed this visa very carefully. I think there have been some concerns that, if you have overseas apprentices, there is some possibility that they can be exploited. I can give you the assurance that the overseas apprentices will have exactly the same protections as the local apprentices. They will work under the existing award conditions or under the same conditions, in accordance with our apprenticeship scheme. Obviously, we all need to be concerned about that, Senator Ludwig, and I am glad you are concerned. I hope I have addressed some of your concerns because this is very important. This is about sustainability. It is not about using people. We are about ensuring that everybody gets the benefit of our economy, particularly in regional and rural Australia. That has to be done in a sustainable sense.

We have to monitor the activities that are going to be undertaken. We have to do that in cooperation, of course, with those people closest to that. The Commonwealth does not want to try to manage Roma. In relationships with state governments—in the case of Roma, with the Queensland government—we ensure that they are responsible for the apprenticeship training. That is going to ensure that both the employers and the sponsors are abiding by their obligations. That is a very important aspect of this. They have to abide by their obligations and that includes Australian awards and conditions.

Here we have a need. We know that need cannot be provided for under the current arrangements or in the foreseeable future. We can talk about the history of all of that sort of stuff, but, as a pragmatist, Senator Bartlett, I know that regional Queensland and other areas like that have a need right at the moment. We need to ensure that, in fulfilling that need, we are not excluding other Australians from opportunities. We have a board that gets up every day to ensure that we are not excluding Australians. That is very important. We have someone who gets up every day to ensure that does not happen.

As I said, we have received nine sponsorship applications so far. Only one has been approved. This is not going to be a huge rush. This is part of a suite of programs to ensure that every single Australian can get a benefit from what I think is our excellent management of our economy. For that to continue to be sustainable, and particularly to equitably and in a very just sense ensure that every single Australian can enjoy the benefits of this government’s good work, these sorts of visas are needed. I entreat senators opposite not to support this disallowance motion because it certainly is not in the interests of Australians or of regional Australia.

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

There have been some useful points made by both speakers in this disallowance debate thus far. Certainly the Democrats concur with a lot of what the Labor Party said in relation to criticisms of the government’s record on investing in training. The number of apprentices and trainees has declined. The number of students enrolled in vocational education and training in 2004 declined. We have had a reduced overall public investment in universities and TAFEs as a proportion of GDP. That is a poor record. The Democrats have been critical on many occasions of the government’s failure to adequately invest in skills training, whether it is in universities, TAFE or other vocational education.

But, as Senator Scullion said—and I think he even faintly perhaps acknowledged that there is some substance to that concern—we are dealing with what the reality is now. Complaining about what the current circumstance is does not help to solve the problem. There is no doubt that there is a shortage and an inability to fill some of the places that are around. Simply complaining about the government’s failure to adequately invest in this area does not actually fix the problem, related though it may be, of inability to actually fill some of the places.

The point could be made—and, in fact, I think the point has been made by the government—that we have a lot of people coming here on student visas and doing studies at university, so having them come in on another visa to do skills training is somewhat comparable. The Democrats do not oppose student visas at universities. We do have concerns—and, again, I think they are very valid concerns—that the lack of adequate government investment in universities has made those universities too dependent on the income from overseas students. I think that is undesirable. But that is not a criticism of overseas student visas themselves; it is a criticism of the inadequacy of the public funding contribution from the government. I think it is important not to get those things mixed up.

The example that Senator Scullion gave—and it was very kind of him and useful to use examples from my own state of Queensland—was a valid one. Of course, even when there are places available and there are Australians available to take some apprenticeships up, it is more difficult in regional areas. Indeed, it depends on what you call regional. During the last election campaign, actually, I visited a machinery workshop in Maroochydore or Caloundra on the Sunshine Coast just north of Brisbane. It is not normally thought of, certainly, as the outback. It is sometimes called regional, depending on where you draw the line. They were having great difficulty in getting apprentices for some of their places there. I and the Democrats do not have a problem with using our migration system to assist in getting some of those places filled. It will assist in generating wider flow-on jobs. It will assist regional communities in particular through generating wider economic and social benefits for those communities. I think that is an important point to make.

As I said in my contribution to the previous disallowance debate—on the disallowance motion that I moved—the Democrats do have strong support for a healthy migration intake. Whilst there are certainly issues that have to be addressed in managing the environmental impacts of population growth, nonetheless we as a country can do an enormous amount better at being more efficient in how we use resources in order to counterbalance the fairly mild increase in population that is coming as a result of our migration program.

The overall number that we are bringing in at the moment, which is quite high even by historic standards in Australia, should be emphasised because it still needs to be made part of the migration debate. The fertility rate, if it continues to decline in the sort of trend that it has over the last 10 to 15 years, will lead to us having a stabilised population by the middle of this century. I think that is an appropriate thing to aim for in terms of environmental sustainability and to ensure that the economic and social benefits that come from a well-managed migration program and a sizeable migration program continue to occur.

I believe it is important to make some of those wider comments about the migration program during debates like this. In recent times there has been debate, certainly following the disturbances in the Cronulla shire prior to Christmas and, indeed, in the last few days following some of the absurd overreaction overseas to the publication of some cartoons in newspapers, originally in Denmark and then elsewhere. Those sorts of incidents always spark up debate again about multiculturalism: who we should bring into this country, how many people, where from, what the mix of them should be and, for some people, whether we should have people coming at all, certainly with regard to the sorts of numbers that we have coming at the moment or from particular regions.

There is an understandable sensitivity about engaging with some of those topics, but I believe that we—certainly people like me—need to engage with them. For a number of years, the position of the Democrats—the party as a whole—has been to support a sizeable migration intake and that we should be more strongly promoting the benefits of it. We should not be shy about that. We need to actually confront head-on some of the apprehension in the community, because it is quite understandable.

The concerns raised in the context of just this visa include whether or not apprenticeships that Australians could have will go to people coming from overseas. The government speaker, Senator Scullion, I think adequately addressed that concern, but it is understandable that people would have it. We need to confront that and reassure people about that. Of course, people would feel resentful if they thought, ‘My kids can’t get a job and they can’t get an apprenticeship, and we’re bringing in people from overseas to take the jobs.’ That is not the case and we need to make it clear that that is not what is happening and that is not what this visa is about. We need to confront that directly and acknowledge that that is a legitimate concern, not just dismiss it as coming from people who are anti-migrant. I do not think there is enough of that in the migration debate. I appreciate that this disallowance motion is about a specific visa. I am certainly not accusing the movers of it in the Labor Party of having that motivation. To some extent, we confine our comments in this debate to the nature of the specific visa, as we did with the last disallowance.

I think we cannot compartmentalise these issues too much, because there does need to be a greater engagement with the community concerns about our migration program as a whole and about the size of the intake, particularly when you consider the very large intake of people on temporary residency visas. If I remember correctly, that is a point that Professor Hugo from South Australia has made. For all the focus on how many people come here as migrants—and, as I said, the number is quite large currently, even by historical standards; it is around 140,000 in this financial year—the number of temporary residents coming in is, I think, likely to be 450,000 in this financial year. So they are quite large numbers.

I believe the evidence is very clear that Australia has benefited enormously—socially, economically and culturally—from the sizeable migration intake over the last 50 to 60 years, but it is also clear that there is still sizeable community concern about aspects of it and that aspects of it need to be engaged with fully. We cannot just have large numbers of people coming here and not accept that there are management issues to deal with about that. There are certainly environmental issues to deal with that we do not manage adequately. We do not manage adequately environmental and resource management for the people who are here, let alone the ones who are coming next.

A related issue is the failure of governments at state and federal level to adequately invest in infrastructure in general—not just education and training but wider community infrastructure. Bringing in more people at a time when we are failing to adequately put public investment in that infrastructure is a problem, but it is a problem with the failure of the policy of the government. I believe it should not be reversed around to say: ‘We can’t take migrants in because we don’t have enough of this or enough of that.’ Those aspects need to be acknowledged.

Another aspect also needs to be addressed. It is a concern that I have with this visa. It is not a sufficiently big enough concern for me to support the disallowance, but it is a concern that still needs to be raised, and that is the overall amount of settlement assistance that people get. If we want to get maximum benefit for our country, our communities, our regions, our economy, our society and the multicultural nature of Australia, we need to assist people in every possible way when they first come to the country. Whilst we have done well in various areas with settlement programs, we have not done perfectly. We are getting some more gaps and some more failures in that area. That applies to the humanitarian intake. I will not divert by repeating the concerns that I have raised many times about the absurd refusal to adequately help refugees on temporary protection visas, but I think we are also not doing as well as we need to with our other humanitarian intake.

We are also not doing as well as we need to with people in the skilled area coming in. The fact is that people coming in on this visa have to have the financial capacity to meet not just their course fees but also their living expenses, travel and other costs for themselves, their spouses and dependent children, and adequate health insurance. They are people who have a bit of money to back themselves up. They have to have the educational qualifications and skills background.

The fact that people might have a bit of money and education and are not a refugee from a camp in the middle of Africa does not mean that they do not need settlement assistance. We need to do better with that. It is an investment from the public and government side of things. Early on it is of course a cost, but it is a cost that should be seen as an investment that will pay off much more significantly in the long term. I believe with regard to this visa—and I am happy to be corrected if I am wrong—that people getting it will not have access to government settlement services. We are talking about people coming in to get trained in skills. They will still be basically unskilled immigrants, under the age of 35, I believe, moving to a different country and into regional areas—hopefully into areas quite remote from the capital cities—with no broader settlement support services other than what the employer might provide. That is not ideal, and that is an aspect that needs to be looked at, both with this visa and others more widely. Nonetheless, people getting this visa are required to have vocational English. As I said, I understand that they need to be less than 35 years of age and already be sponsored by an Australian employer or organisation which has to have approval as a trade skills training visa sponsor.

There are clearly benefits to areas that come from these visas being filled. People regularly comment—partly in response to environmental concerns and other issues to do with adequate distribution and viability of services—that we need to be trying to get a higher proportion of our migration intake into regional areas. That is easy to say; it is not so easy to do. But one piece of moderate credit I have to give the government is that they have made some advances in recent years in finding formulas—to some extent in cooperation with the states—that have meant that more migrants are going to regional areas, to states other than New South Wales and to places other than Sydney, reducing some of the pressures there, and are assisting in improving the economic and social viability of other communities. That is a positive aspect that I think still has a lot of room for further gains, but wherever there is an opportunity for that to be done, whether it is through this visa or others, it is one we need to seek to undertake.

In some ways it is fair enough to call this visa a bandaid to meet some of the skills shortages, but a bandaid is still better than no bandaid, and it does goes some way to addressing the problem. The problem is, in significant part, of the government’s making. Senator Scullion said that it is ‘of the government’s making’ in generating a good economy. He forgot, I am sure inadvertently, to mention the Democrats’ contribution to having that good economy through our cooperative approach over the last nine years in the Senate, enabling most legislation to go through and, indeed, improving some of the government’s legislation, not least their workplace relations legislation that enabled a more harmonious and effective employment market. Unfortunately, I think we will soon see the consequences of us not being able to do that with the most recent workplace changes. However, apart from the cause of the overall operation of the economy generating this, there is no doubt that inadequate investment by the government in some of these areas of skills development is also part of the reason. But that does not mean that we should not try and address the situation that confronts us at the moment.

So whilst the Labor Party raised some valid concerns, I do not believe they are sufficient for us to support removing this visa altogether. The clarification Senator Scullion gave did address some of those concerns, although not all. Some of the other concerns that Labor expressed are totally valid, but they are still nonetheless separate from the specifics of the visa itself. I nonetheless reinforce my concern about the need, wherever possible, to provide broader settlement assistance to people. We need to be looking at that—even with people coming in on temporary visas—and perhaps call it something other than settlement assistance. It is in our interests as a country to make sure that people do have as much support as possible in those early stages when they move here from overseas, particularly if they are going to regional areas and particularly if they are younger. That will help them, but I think it helps us as well—and that is a concern that I have. It is one that I think will help alleviate not all but more of the community unease about aspects of migration. You will never address all of those concerns, and you would not want to with some of them, because they are concerns that I believe are inappropriate. But there are some valid aspects to community concerns about aspects of the migration program. We need to more positively promote and sell the gains to the entire community from large components of our migration program. I do not believe we do that enough, and we need to look at ways to do it more and more.

That does not mean that any sized migration program is desirable. The calls from some in the business community to massively ramp up our migration intake are simply unrealistic and absurd. Suggestions of doubling our migration intake, of aiming for a 40 million population or things like that, are unsustainable in all sorts of ways. But a good healthy intake is a positive for the country and is clearly workable, and the benefits that it has produced are there for all to see. However, that does not mean that we should turn a blind eye to some of the potential negatives that need management, and I think we can do a better job there.

I have raised a few side issues in addressing this disallowance motion, but I believe from what has been put on the record that, on balance, this visa is worth supporting. That is not to say that other problems do not need addressing, but I think the visa itself is worth supporting and I think it will be a net positive to many communities and to Australia—like, I might say, so much else of our migration program.

Question negatived.