Tony Zappia (Makin, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Mr Deputy Speaker, as I said a moment ago, this matter and the issue we are discussing are all about human rights and people’s rights. I simply point out that those rights were the subject of considerable work by a committee of this parliament and it was the committee’s view that the rights of people who come into this country ought to be protected and that the policies of the past did not go far enough in protecting them. The point I am clearly making is that the committee’s view was supported by all members of the committee—including members of the coalition, who now seek to suggest that the views expressed by the committee, which in turn support government policy, are the cause of, supposedly, a surge of people wanting to come to this country. I simply say this, Mr Deputy Speaker: this is, in my view, another example of coalition members saying one thing but doing another. They come into this House and take a particular position on a matter and then, at the first possible opportunity, take the opposite position on the same matter. And if one member takes one position, then another takes an entirely different position. This matter—you have asked me to reflect on whether it is relevant to this debate—was further raised not just by one speaker from the coalition but by a number of speakers from the coalition when they were speaking on this very bill. And it seems to me that if we are going to debate the rights and wrongs of any legislation in this place and how it applies to human rights then the alternative argument ought to be allowed to be put. But, Mr Deputy Speaker, I take your guidance and I will move on.

In respect of the very issue that I was speaking to and the purported comments made by other members—which I must say were disputed by the very person who some of those comments were attributed to, and which were reported in one of the newspapers—on the same day that some of those comments were made, yesterday, the Prime Minister came into the chamber and moved a motion on Australia’s support for human rights in this country, recognising the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. That motion was immediately followed by a bipartisan supporting statement by the Leader of the Opposition, who seconded the Prime Minister’s motion. This is about human rights—a motion to do with human rights and how we should treat people once they come into this country. A number of speakers from the coalition spoke in support of the human rights motion that the Prime Minister moved. Yet I heard them, on the same day, come out and again state a position which was clearly in contradiction of the very principles which the Leader of the Opposition says we should be supporting and upholding. Mr Deputy Speaker, I ask again: does the opposition leader in fact speak on behalf of all members of the coalition, or is this a case where opposition members, both frontbenchers and backbenchers, are clearly undermining the opposition leader?

More importantly, I think that the Australian public have a right to know just what the real position of the coalition is on all of these matters. It is not reasonable to have one position coming from one member, another position coming from a member on the front bench, and yet another position coming from the Leader of the Opposition. I believe that the Australian people are entitled to know, when it comes to all of these matters, just what the position of the coalition is. And it is no different from what we are seeing right now in another bill that is being debated in this place, and that is the Fair Work Bill, where again we are constantly being told that the opposition does not oppose this bill, yet speaker after speaker comes into the chamber and condemns it.

Let us go back one step in respect of how this bill arose. The reason these workers are coming into Australia is to fulfil shortages of skilled and professional workers needed by Australian industries. And why is there a shortage of skilled workers? Because the previous coalition government failed to invest adequately in education and skills training, that is why; it is as clear and simple as that. Had the previous government put the effort and money into supporting the training, education and skilling-up of people in this country over the last decade, there would not be the need to bring in skilled workers from overseas.

Yet yesterday, we had the absurd proposition of the opposition raising as a matter of public importance the issue relating to the state of Australia’s health services. One of the key problems facing Australia’s delivery of good health services in this country is the shortage of nurses and doctors. That shortage has occurred because over the last decade there were not enough places in our universities to train doctors and nurses. It is as simple as that. So for the opposition members to come in here and criticise this government for problems which have resulted from their own negligence is, I must say, hypocritical in the least.

We do face serious skills shortages across most employment sectors in Australia. Those shortages are causing serious productivity constraints. In the interim, we are forced to rely on skilled people from overseas. We see it prevalent in the health sector, in the information and technology sector and in the science sectors. Global recruiting has become standard practice of many Australian employers. I want to relay another example of a matter that I raised in the House probably three or four months ago when I was talking about immigration. In the region that I represent there is the group of industry leaders that we refer to as the Northern Economic Leaders Group. These are senior industry leaders in South Australia. It is a good group that is working in collaboration with the government to try and address a whole range of problems including the skills shortage problems. In a meeting some six months ago, every single person that came to that meeting and sat around the table said that their single biggest crisis was their inability to find skilled workers to fill the positions that they had available in their industries. It was a major issue for every single one of them, so we accept that there will be a need to bring people in from overseas to fill those jobs.

But if they are to be brought in then we also accept that they ought to be brought in and be treated as we would like to be treated ourselves if we were to be employed in the position that we offer them. They ought to be given the same level of protection as every other worker who comes into this country and who works in this country. And they ought to be given the same level of protection that they would be given if they went to other countries. Sadly, one of the problems was that, under the previous government’s Work Choices legislation, it was not just the skilled workers brought in from overseas that were given no protection; all workers were given little protection. It makes it pretty hard to say, ‘You are not treating the skilled workers coming from overseas right,’ when they say, ‘It is no different to the way we have been treating other workers in this country for the last few years.’

We have to do two things, and thank God that this government is doing them. One is repealing the Work Choices legislation and introducing the Fair Work legislation of the Rudd government, and the other is fixing up the issues associated with workers who come in under 457 visas. That is exactly what this bill is going to do.

Finally, I just want to make this point. Many of the workers who are most exploited when they come into this country are those who are employed in what you would refer to as low-skilled areas of occupation. Over the last three or four years I have spoken with a whole range of people in industry sectors who have had various levels of experience with people working in low-skilled areas, and I have to say that the stories that have got back to me are absolutely appalling. I have heard stories where people who come to this country are perhaps brought here by a member of their own community who then in a sense organises them but equally exploits them; and stories of other people who come into this country, again brought in by maybe a migration agency or another person from their own community, who then have to pay a fair share of their income to that person. If they object, information is immediately passed on to the authorities and their visa is cancelled for one reason or another. Some of these people are the very people who ended up in detention centres—and the committee ended up having to investigate how they got there and whether they were held there in appropriate conditions. So my comments about the detention centre are also relevant in respect of this matter.

This is a bill which hopefully will address all of these issues. It is a bill that is long overdue and it is a bill that will go a long way towards ensuring that Australia has fair work conditions not only because of our new fair works laws but also because we are upholding the very principles that are espoused in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which both the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition spoke in support of yesterday. I commend the bill to the House.

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