Ewen Jones (Herbert, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

First and foremost, I acknowledge the member for Makin and his rightful concern about youth unemployment, senior unemployment and underemployment in this country, but I do not think the temporary employment visa is the sole issue here. In my city of Townsville, we do not have a lot of temporary employment visa holders, but in my region of North Queensland it is a rite of passage for a lot of international backpackers to come to work at Bowen with the small crops of beans, tomatoes, rockmelons, honeydew melons and strawberries, and around the Burdekin with pumpkins, rockmelons and, of course, mangoes. The backpackers come up the highway, stay in hostels and pick up a bit of cash in Australian working conditions with Australian award wages. In fact, employers are paying superannuation for these foreign workers, who will not get it back until they leave the country. For me, it is a valuable part and a value-adding proposition for these people to come through our country.

I say the member to Makin that I looked through the six years while Labor were in government and I did not see one speech that he made that was critical of his own government, the number of visas handed out and the way the system was working whilst they were in government. It is very easy to sit in opposition and throw spears, but when you are part of the system it is much harder to fix it.

What I see as the real concern about temporary work visas is the Centrelink system, which makes it awfully hard for people to transition into seasonal work. The member for Makin and the member for Wakefield, who is also in the chamber, are from South Australia, where seasonal workers pick grapes and so on.

What we see in North Queensland is that, for people who are youth unemployed and all that sort of thing, to be able to transition out for a short period of time and then get back into the system can often be frustrating. It is time consuming. It is difficult to transition out of unemployment, take those temporary roles and transition back. There are often time lags there, and quite often you will find that there will be small debts accrued through Centrelink that they then have to pay back out of their benefits. So, if you do not make it easy for people to transition through these things and then transition out, you make it awfully hard for Australian people to take these jobs when someone comes through and there are ads going up for people to do this sort of work where they can just jump straight in and have a go.

I often worry about some of the things—we have the Green Army—that we are trying to do here, trying to give people resilience. It is not easy there. In North Queensland, we just saw Glencore on the weekend announce a further 535 jobs being cut at Mount Isa. It is the cyclical nature of resource prices, and that sort of thing. It further adds to the employment issues around my area.

Blaming foreign workers is an easy thing to do, and pointing the finger at other people for the things we are doing in our own systems is an easy thing to do. What we have to do is make it as easy as possible for people to get a job. It is not about wages. For me it has never been about wages There was the Kelly review in 1908-09, which said that, for the profitability of the company, it did not matter what the wages were. We made a decision in the early 1900s that we are going to be a high-wage nation. You could be a high-wage nation if you have serious low input costs and high productivity. What we must do is make sure that they stay there. We must make sure that, if we are going to pay penalty rates and we are going to pay all this stuff here, we are earning them. Above all else, we must make sure that we reduce the red tape that is floating around these things and makes it hard for people to get a job, and that we make it as easy as possible to transition in and out of seasonal work.

A place like Bowen is a fantastic place to live your life. It is a fantastic place to raise your children, but it is hard to get full-time quality work. When you are faced with those things you must look at other things there, and seasonal work is one of those things. It is the same as the haul-out drivers when we are harvesting cane. It is a transition thing there, but quite often friends of mine who have done it, when they have a wife and three kids and that sort of thing and they are unemployed when they are not hauling out, end up at the end of the financial year with a problem with Centrelink, and we must make that easier.

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