Laurie Ferguson (Werriwa, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

The Migration Amendment (Charging for a Migration Outcome) Bill 2015 has its genesis in the independent inquiry into this area, which included Professor Peter McDonald, an acknowledged Australian demographer of world renown. In September 2014, the inquiry panel handed down its report after engaging with 140 stakeholders and 189 submissions. There was a noble sentiment from the government in its reaction. It said:

The government will act on the recommendations of the review to ensure Australian workers have priority, while supporting employer with genuine skill shortages …

It then spoke of sponsor monitoring of the high-risk areas; a tighter and more sophisticated targeting of sponsors; an investigations division; information sharing; closer work with other government agencies, most particularly the ATO; information being given to visa holders, sponsors to be targeted with information and for more information to be provided on employer sanctions so that the message actually gets out there; having a few show trials to ensure people are aware of what is happening; new penalties; and work on a less complex training contribution scheme to replace the one that currently operates with the one and two per cent figures that go towards training Australians. In this bill more specifically, the government has made it a criminal offence for a sponsor or other third party to ask for or receive a benefit in relation to a sponsorship and has defined 'benefit' as 'any payment or deduction or any real or personal property advantage, service or gift'. There are civil penalties, and they enumerate the reality of those penalties.

I was very impressed with the contributions made by the member for Wills and the member for Dobell, but I do take up one minor point with the member for Dobell, which is crucial to the realities here. She spoke of there being some instances of misconduct by a number of franchisees of 7-Eleven. Let us get it straight, because this very example demonstrates the broad nature of our problem: it was not just 'a few franchisees'; it was the company's structure that basically compelled franchisees to engage in this conduct. Therefore, it was no accident that on 1 October there was the announcement of Michael Smith being appointed to a position in the company, and the departure of chairman Russell Withers, executive member Warren Wilmot and general operations manager Natalie Dalbo. Clearly this was a scheme, an operation, that meant a lot of small-time contractors who had aspirations in life came into 7-Eleven as these franchisees and then had a gun at their heads, essentially, to engage in this kind of conduct. I think it gives some indication of the size of the issue.

We of course have some very positive aspects of multiculturalism. We are up there with Israel and Luxembourg with regard to the proportion of our population born overseas or whose parents were born overseas, but we are, unfortunately, getting another statistic of international renown and that is the high proportion of temporary workers in this country. We are now speaking of a figure of one million people in this country at any one time on a form of temporary work, and, with unemployment and underemployment of 800,000, you have to ask yourself whether we have got this askew.

This is well overdue—I do not want to go into politics of Labor and Liberal—quite frankly, it has needed to be tackled for quite a while. In as early as 2010, I wrote to the then Minister for Immigration of my concerns about a practice in Harris Park, very close to where I live, where a very prominent immigration lawyer was being paid by Indian workers, who were out here, to get work experience documentation from a prominent Indian restaurant in that suburb—people paying the lawyer directly to get false histories of employment in the restaurant sector.

Figures of $50,000 are common amongst the South Indian population in this country for, basically, getting assistance towards these visas. In one instance, I heard of a case where $150,000 changed hands. I know of another situation where one lawyer, has, on at least two occasions, split $50,000 with an employer for an ENS—a 121 visa, which is now a 186 application—where the sponsoring business had already closed before the visa application was lodged. In one case, with regard to this lawyer, it was referred to MARA, the responsible agency overseeing this sector, but nothing occurred. Whether it was because of a lack of evidence or whatever, I do not know. That same lawyer acted for one restaurant owner, who owns several restaurants in the Hunter Valley, who charged at least 10 people $50,000 for 457 visa sponsorships. This is symptomatic of the realities in the sector.

A commercial kitchen employer advised a friend of mine that he lost seven Nepalese cooks in one week recently, when they all got approval for 187 visas based on scam payments. None of these people ended up working for their sponsoring regional employer. And that is another aspect of this: there is an attempt to get people into needy regional sectors; they get these visas and that is the last that one hears of them.

The scheme reflects that which operates for contract marriages, contained in sections 240 to 245 of the Migration Act. While the government has moved, and I appreciate their activity on this matter, I do not think it should be limited only to these particular types of visas. Part of what has been exposed in the Australian media, whether it is on Channel 7, ABC or The Australian, is not restricted to those specific employment-related visas. Working holiday visas and student visas, amongst many others, are being utilised in this attempt to (a) subvert Australia's level of industrial relations conditions and ( b) to basically facilitate people's false claims to eventually migrate into this country. It should not be limited to these narrow groups of visas. I think there is some question about whether the penalties are higher. We have to look at the question of the ABN numbers, because, in that inquiry, we did say that they should not have ABN numbers. We did refer to the issue of ATO cooperation.

We have a situation where people are clearly paying sizeable amounts of money. I do not want to say, for a moment, that all of the people who enter this country under these schemes are being intimidated, are being threatened. Often you find in immigration, when people have failed cases for refugees et cetera, it is all the fault of the lawyer or the migration agent. The poor claimant was totally uninvolved in the documents they signed. That is not the reality. The main issue here we have to face is employers exploiting people, forcing them, when they are students, to work longer than 20 hours and then blackmailing them for their participation in that scheme. There are some sectors of the economy where we have areas of virtual enslavement—where people are being held under force, living in extremely substandard conditions, working many hours for which they are not paid and clearly working for under award wages and not under other immigration related requirements. There are often people involved in these cases who have come from overseas and do not mind this as long as they get a foot in the door in Australia. They are also involved in getting onshore so that a number of options might open up to them with regard to immigration. That is a bit of the reality.

We have seen a variety of allegations and exposes in this area. In The Sydney Morning Herald on 6 August—quite a while back, considering how long these exposes have been going now—Nick McKenzie and Richard Baker detailed how international colleges take cash kickbacks for helping overseas workers and students with Australian visas with fake qualifications. It is the same kind of thing. It is just not in relation to work visas.

Fairfax found that TK Melbourne Education and Training College was offered access to the streamlined visa program by the department, despite having recently been found to be in critical non-compliance—not minor infractions but critical noncompliance. In another article in The Sydney Morning Herald, Schneider Elevators was accused of secretly deducting visa charges and building industry fees from the pay of workers on temporary visas, leaving them with weekly take-home wages of between $150 and $500. When the wages were stopped the workers could no longer afford their lodging. The workers were forced to sleep on an office floor for six weeks, at which time one worker was being paid as little as $25 to $40 a week.

A recent investigation by Nick Toscano in The Age reported that Fair Work had uncovered that a flatbread maker, Mountain Bread, had been grossly underpaying staff working on 457 and 417 visas—mostly backpackers and international students. The investigation found that many staff at a factory in Reservoir, in Melbourne's north, had been illegally paid rates as low as $16 an hour, with no penalty rates, leading to tens of thousands of dollars in underpayments.

There has up to this stage been no specific power to take action in such cases. The bill will make these exchanges unlawful, excluding payments deemed to be a reasonable amount for professional services provided in the course of obtaining a sponsorship—for example, advice and services provided by migration agents and lawyers and for education, recruitment and so on. This is well and truly an issue of national concern. It is a situation where we are talking of, as I said earlier, tens of thousands of dollars being passed for a successful outcome. That outcome involves fraud—fraudulent claims as to whether the industry needs the people, fraudulent claims as to their status in regard to their qualifications, fraud about their pay levels et cetera.

An earlier speaker quite rightly spoke about the lack of background checks for many of these entrants to Australia. I have to say that one of the constant realities for members of parliament in high-migration areas is the extreme delays for people who are trying to bring their spouses to Australia, because the department—under Labor or Liberals—has not prioritised those cases amongst the spouse intake who have obvious security issues and basically let the others through as quickly as possible. Because of that, there are significant delays in people being reunited with their spouses. And yet we see in this field a rampant disinterest in the background-checking of people. At the end of the day, there is an agenda in this country basically to let it all hang out and make sure that we get as many people in here as possible because of sometimes genuine shortages in some sectors of the economy, but those shortages, those niche areas, are being utilised to totally destroy the integrity of the system in regard to work visas.

As I say, I think this is a good initiative from the government. It is well and truly time for it to happen. There are other things that can be done in this area to enhance integrity. We need a few people actually up there being penalised. We need a lot more lawyers and migration agents pursued. We need an investigatory unit that is effective and is properly resourced to make sure it really happens.

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