Sharman Stone (Murray, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

The Migration Amendment (Temporary Sponsored Visas) Bill 2013 is about a very serious matter, and that is the capacity of the country to bring in skilled workers when we cannot find those people in Australia, where we do not have the particular skills or skilled Australians are not prepared to move to parts of the country where the jobs are going begging. This is particularly the case in rural and regional Australia. I have to say that, without access to temporary sponsored visas—which we colloquially call 457 visas—the food manufacturing and processing industry in northern Victoria would have suffered very significantly from lack of human capacity.

Northern Victoria is an ideal place for conducting the business of raising pigs. Huge piggeries which are very scientifically advanced are to be found in places like Yarrawalla and on the Patho Plains. These are very sparsely populated areas. They are flat and they have access to good quality water, but they are a long way from any capital city. In fact they are a long way from major country towns. So when try to employ qualified piggery managers or operatives, ideally with some veterinary background and experience, the owners and managers of these piggeries have drawn a blank. They have not been able to attract skilled workers to come and work in these piggeries.

One enterprise I would like to refer to is at Yarrawalla, which is about three or four hours from Melbourne and about another hour or so from a major centre. They now have a skilled workforce who have been attracted by the use of the 457 visas—these people have come from the Philippines, where many of them had in fact been trained as veterinarians. I had the great pleasure of conferring citizenship upon the three families of these skilled workers in this local piggery this Australia Day. These younger family members now attend local schools. The schools were in decline in terms of their population numbers. As a result of these families now filling up the desks in small schools in places like Pyramid Hill, we have revitalised the communities themselves.

So, as a consequence of being able to access the skilled workforce, in this case from the Philippines, to work in these enormous piggeries, some of the biggest in Australia, and benchmarked as world's best practice, we have also revitalised our communities and managed to have new citizens who can be given all the opportunities that our country has—with their young children now attending our local schools. We also have had numbers of 457 skilled workers taking up the important and significant work in our abattoirs in places like Tongala.

Again, the local managers and owners of these abattoirs would be more than happy to engage local people, to employ local people, without going through the hassle of the application process for a person via a 457 visa. But unfortunately when they put out applications for workers in the abattoirs—these are skilled workers, people who can also take up a management position—they draw a blank. They do not get applicants for these positions.

At the Tongala abattoir, run by Greenhams, a very successful, 100 per cent export abattoir that sends ground beef to the USA, they are now dependent on international backpackers for their workforce, given it has been made that much harder for them to attract skilled 457 visa holders. That abattoir is a major employer in its own right and it is of critical importance to the dairy industry, since it processes cattle that are no longer required to produce milk.

We have dairy operations in Kyabram in my area—again, some of these dairies are among the biggest milk producers in Australia. They employ 457 visa holders—again many of them from the Philippines—who are prepared to work long hours, the back-to-back shifts, in a dairy operation where there are thousands of cows milked over a 24-hour period, seven days a week.

The suggestion guiding this legislation or what has prompted this legislation, we are told, is major rorting of the whole business of temporary sponsored visas in Australia. As the previous speaker said, when we asked for the evidence of this 'massive rorting'—apparently 10,000 rorts Minister O'Connor proclaimed in this place—none was forthcoming. An FOI inquiry could not give us any documentation or information that backed up the allegation that the 457 visa system was corruptly used and, to use the old-fashioned term, was simply being rorted. There is no evidence of systematic or widespread rorting of the system. In fact it is a brilliant scheme.

I was particularly pleased when I was the shadow minister for immigration to track a lot of the sponsored visa holders, including Chinese workers who were making sure that abattoirs could still be operated along the Murray River. I tracked all of the state government employed 457 visa holders, who backfill the long-term vacancies in allied health positions through much of regional Australia and also in metropolitan Australia. It is ironic that some of the biggest employers of 457 visa holders in the country are state governments.

I was shocked, I have to say, and I suspect my colleagues were equally amazed, to hear that the Prime Minister herself has even had to find a temporary sponsored visa holder to fill a media position in her office. I am not suggesting she rorted the system in finding that person. I am not suggesting that person is replacing somebody else. He undoubtedly has a unique set of employment characteristics that brought him to that position. This is not evidence of rorting the program. What I worry about is that again it is the dead hand of the unions getting engaged in a program where people who come do not typically end up joining a union; they simply go to work with the sponsor and they simply fill a position which has not been able to be filled by an Australian worker.

We are told that this new legislation will require evidence of labour market testing to accompany an application for nomination. Does this government seriously think that employers do not first look around in an informal way and see if there is an applicant who is nearby or who can be lured after fairly careful efforts in recruitment? Does this government seriously think that employers turn first to a 457 visa holder, given the paperwork involved and given the costs involved in establishing a new temporary skilled visa holder in the workplace? Of course it is nonsense to suggest that the local market is not now tested by someone contemplating as a last resort having to go offshore to find themselves a temporary sponsored visa holder. That is not the case.

And then we are told that there will be exemptions from the labour market testing regime in circumstances where there has been a 'major disaster' or where the skill level of the nominated occupation is equivalent to skill level 1 or skill level 2 as provided for in the Australian And New Zealand Standard Classification of Occupations or ANZSCO. So we already have exemptions to all of this. Again there was an implication, I have to say, from the minister when he talked about the rorting, that a lot of these 457 visa holders were somehow being paid less than the equivalent locally employed person in the same industry in a similar job. Again, the evidence is to the contrary. When you are desperate to have someone give you the skilled work that you need to keep your enterprise going, when you perhaps look forward to a transfer of their skills or technology to further enhance your own domestically recruited workforce, you certainly do not lure them paying them less. You typically find that the 457 visa holder in my part of Australian is paid equivalent to or more than a locally engaged staff member.

I have to say that in the case of my 457 visa sponsors they typically also find accommodation for the person, they ensure that families are properly accommodated and are quickly integrated into the community, because they are very concerned that their efforts in attracting the 457 visa holder do not lead to a very short-term relationship. They want that new skilled worker to stay. When the coalition was in government, the Australian expectation was that a lot of these skilled workers would in fact become Australian citizens and there was a rate of about 30 or 40 per cent conversions when we were in government to people taking up permanent residency and citizenship. I would hope that number has grown since that time.

So this Migration Amendment (Temporary Sponsored Visas) Bill is based on a fallacy. The fallacy is that there is widespread rorting and abuse of a system which has skilled workers coming in to fill positions that cannot be filled in Australia. I now have in my area of northern Victoria numbers of employers who are in despair because they were able to access these sponsored visas in the past and now the red tape, the go-slows, the innuendos about their motives are such that they are finding that they cannot access the temporary sponsored visa regime at all. So what do they do? They cannot get local workers to step up and do the tasks. We are an area of declining population and we have a brain drain in our part of the world where people who are more technically qualified tend to leave the area and go to metropolitan alternative places to live and work. We have had an experience of the most superb workers coming and becoming enmeshed in our communities under this 457 visa scheme.

I have to restate that in meddling with this scheme it appears to me to be nothing more than the dead hand of the unions trying to take control of a workforce with no regard to the needs of the employer, with no regard to the needs of the actual industry itself. There seems to be no perception or conception of the difficulties in rural Australia in attracting a skilled and qualified workforce. I think that is a huge shame. The fact that half of these amendments to the bill are to do with inspectors, enforceable undertakings with the minister, looking at special civil penalty provisions for those who have committed an offence against the relevant provisions—the whole thing sounds like the earlier era of some fascist regime. I think it is a shame. I with the coalition oppose this business. I hope that common sense will prevail or it will be just another piece of legislation we have to make sure does work when, if the Australian public sees fit, we return to office after 14 September.

Finally, let me stress that this is an excellent government run skilled migration program which uses temporary sponsored visas. We have provisions in the regulations to ensure that people who come have an adequate English-language facility. We have within this set of migration regulations already adequate safeguards should there be a rare moment of someone trying to exploit the system. There are rules about wages that have to be paid. This was a well-managed system but, sadly, it has been destroyed under this government. If there is an abuse of the system now, let me say that it is by this government trying to insert into the workforce of Australia a whole lot of additional regulations which will simply make it harder for our manufacturing sector and our service sector, our health services sector, and will make them even more despairing of how they going to sustain and retain an adequate workforce. I have to hope for the sake of my piggeries, my abattoirs, my dairy operations, my hospitals, all the allied health professionals who come out here on a 457 visa; I have to say to them, 'Just hang on and we will do our best to make sure that the system is not destroyed as we wait for the next election.'

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