Kim Beazley (Brand, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

If you want me to debate the facts, I am giving you some facts that I strongly suspect you have never thought of. You have never thought of the consequences of what you did. When you collapsed the National Training Authority, you created a set of circumstances whereby we started to experience massive skills shortages. Then what they are starting to do to try to deal with this—in part try to deal with it: they have another agenda here that is closely bound up with this, and that is youth wages—is to make up for the consequences of 10 years worth of utterly massive neglect. Skilled migration should never be the primary source to deliver adequate skilled labour. Skilled migration is important. It is a valuable component of Australia’s cultural and economic development, but community support for it is a pretty tender reed. When this government starts to do things like this, it worries ordinary Australian parents, worries ordinary Australian youngsters. It suppresses and makes difficult in life the opportunities that are there for young Australians to get themselves proper training.

Nothing could be more calculated than to bring the skilled migration program into utter discredit. The objective of this of course is that, when an employer comes forward—and by heavens, they will be encouraged not to get young Australians out of this one—if the youngster does not agree, and I am talking about an overseas youngster here, to what are no longer controlled apprenticeship wages as awards collapse, they do not get their visa. That is all there is to it. So they are under even more of your signature or your brains on the contract than the average Australian worker, and they are in a not much better position as a result of the industrial relations legislation being put in place. The utter cynicism of this worthless, wretched government.

Fortunately, we have about 18 months between now and the next election, when the impact of that industrial relations legislation will slowly start to flow through. We will not really experience any substantial impact of it until about the middle of next year. But that will be time enough for these matters to be deliberated on by the Australian people when the next election comes round and this proposition will be part of it, because it will be used by your people and by your supporters in regional Australia. It will be obvious to many young Australians whom you have turned your backs on that you are exploiting them and you will be dealt with in those situations. I have absolute confidence in that.

This visa, as I said, goes hand in hand with the Howard government’s extreme industrial relations changes—low wages, no benefits, cheap imported labour to take Australian TAFE places and Australian jobs. Let us see how it has started already. Look at the young Ballarat apprentices who lost their chance of an apprenticeship when, instead, transport company MaxiTRANS imported welders from China. This is not a matter of theory; it is an outcome that will be seen by people in regional Australia as related to this particular proposition that you are now putting forward. You do not give a damn about the young apprentices at MaxiTRANS—you knock them off and import labour to replace them. What about Brumby’s Bakery, who hired 20 bakers from Vietnam because, even after a two-year local recruitment drive, they said they could not find locals? As a last resort, they went overseas. Yet apprentice bakers do not even qualify for federal government assistance—like the $800 tool kit allowance—because John Howard says that their skills are not in demand. They do not even qualify for this great assistance you talk about in the propositions you put forward. They do not even qualify for your assistance, then you go out and say, ‘But there’s a shortage of these people.’ Overseas workers have been flown into Adelaide to build a car-painting plant for Holden. South African boilermakers have been imported into Western Australia—

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