Sharman Stone (Murray, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Immigration and Citizenship) Share this | Hansard source

I too rise to speak on the Migration Legislation Amendment (Worker Protection) Bill 2008 The coalition do not oppose this bill, because it is a further evolution of the skilled temporary worker program we introduced in 1998. We will always strongly support improved worker protection. Whether it is one person poorly treated or endangered in the workplace or many, the coalition are strongly supportive of any measure aimed at ensuring that no worker in Australia suffers. However, we have some major concerns about the process and lack of information and clarity in relation to this bill—in particular its impacts on those industries trying to locate and sponsor skilled labour offshore. In a sense, there is an unusual situation in Australia at the moment. As Labor mismanages the global problems in our country and we see growing unemployment across the board, there are still industry sectors experiencing extreme shortages of essential skilled labour—for example, in the health sector, in parts of the mining sector, in accountancy and with IT specialists, to name a few.

The coalition is very concerned about the fact that it is being asked to support a framework in this legislation which will guide the formation of detailed regulations. The regulations will be the flesh and blood of the new sponsor obligation regime, but we are in effect being asked to buy a pig in a poke because these regulations are not going to be identified or made available even for comment until some time next year. While employers wish to continue sponsoring their skilled temporary workers, they are doing so with little information about the future sponsorship obligation regime, which will apply to them when those regulations come into practice even if the sponsorship took place some months or even years before.

This is a very difficult situation for us. We have a government that is relying more and more on regulation to manage its legislative regime. The department says: ‘This is fine. This gives us flexibility; this is really great.’ It might give the government flexibility—indeed it does—but the idea of legislation is that new bills that are to become laws should be given proper scrutiny by this place and by the Senate. The legislation must be examined carefully by committee inquiry and the like. When you simply fall back on regulations again and again, you are, I believe, watering down the process of parliamentary scrutiny. Certainly, this bill will leave the employer sponsors with a great deal of uncertainty and a great deal of concern about whether it is actually worth the risk of seeking—it takes a while and is quite costly—these overseas potential employees once they have searched the local market and have not been able to find a worker to suit their needs in Australia.

I appeal to the government: do not keep reaching for regulation because the department has not quite got the job done in time or because you are not sure of your own program or ultimate policy direction—you really need to legislate, not just regulate. In this case, as I say, we support the framework within this bill but, as you can imagine, when the regulations are finally made known to us we will subject them to very close scrutiny indeed.

The coalition commenced the process of bringing into this country a whole new type of worker: the skilled temporary visa holder. We did it in order to try and keep the right level of skills in our economy when from 1996 we were rebuilding our workforce. We inherited a nearly eight per cent unemployment rate from Labor in 1996, but we introduced these 457 visas to fill skills gaps.

We understood that, given these visas had become so very popular, additional resources were needed by the department of immigration to process all the applicants. So the then Minister for Immigration and Citizenship, the Hon. Kevin Andrews, allocated additional resources to try to ensure more streamlined implementation and processing of the 457 visa applicants. That was through the Migration Amendment (Sponsorship Obligations) Bill 2007. But the coalition very much shared the concerns of the majority of those who presented submissions to the inquiry by the Senate Standing Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs, whose report I will simply refer to as the Senate committee report. We wanted a longer inquiry. Sadly, we were only given in effect a few days. There were two main areas of concern expressed by employers. Firstly, employers were very concerned about the additional costs and red tape that might go along with the new obligations for sponsors. Indeed, additional costs and red tape have been signalled or signposted both by DIAC’s own paper and by the Barbara Deegan report, which I will come back to.

Sponsors very much want to be able to fill their skilled jobs which they cannot recruit for locally. But, at the same time, small business people especially are constrained by how much additional cost may be associated with the imported temporary skilled worker and how much extra time the bureaucracy, the red tape, the compliance, the monitoring and the reporting will take as they move this new worker into their workplace. The coalition has always looked very seriously at reducing red tape, particularly for small business, the engine room of our economy. It seems that in relation to this bill we might be looking at a significant blow-out again of administrative costs and impositions on small business. I think it is no surprise that the vast majority of 457 visa category sponsorships have been undertaken by large enterprises or businesses with more than 20 employees. Smaller businesses have just begun to walk away, sighing about the red tape and costs associated with this visa category.

We also had people making submissions to the Senate committee inquiry saying that they were being asked to buy a pig in a poke. This is the issue I mentioned at the outset. They were asked to comment on a bill without any evidence of what the regulations might contain and so were denied a real opportunity for comprehensive debate. This was the case even though the Barbara Deegan report had been passed to the minister. It was there on his desk while the Senate committee inquiry was underway, but those people did not have the advantage or the opportunity of having a look at what was, I think, a very good report by Barbara Deegan. You have to wonder why it would not have been made available to the Senate inquiry. Perhaps the minister had not noticed it on his desk; there were so many other files sitting there awaiting attention, including those relating to the families of 457 visa holders who had Down syndrome dependants, who were being blocked from becoming permanent residents despite their skills being urgently needed by the communities where they were working. So the coalition is very disappointed that the Barbara Deegan report was not available. It is, of course, a real problem for us not knowing what the regulations will hold, but we will subject them to very close scrutiny when they finally do appear. The government has made much of the consultation process. It is very proud of the fact that it is suggesting that next year there will be a lot of toing and froing. The problem is that the bill is with us today and we have no information behind the framework.

Let me also talk about the specifics of the bill. The objective of the bill is to amend the Migration Act 1958 to strengthen the framework for employer sponsorship with a view to ensuring that the working conditions meet Australian standards, particularly wages and conditions, and that sponsorship costs are more fully identified and met by the employer sponsors themselves. Visa holders are currently sponsored by employers who must meet a series of ‘undertakings’. These ‘undertakings’ will now be respecified in what are to be called the new regulations—as I said, we will possibly see these regulations in 2009—and all currently engaged sponsors will be transferred to that new regulatory regime.

In 1996 the coalition introduced the new visa categories, the 457s and related 400 series, to allow employers to sponsor skilled workers on a temporary basis, for between three months and four years, to help ease skilled labour shortages. The Howard government’s 457 program was a huge success. It continues to be a huge success in satisfying the demand for skilled workers and helping to ensure that Australia maintains its international competitiveness. One of the underlying objectives of the program was not just to introduce temporary skilled workers and their families but also, we hoped very much, that where the sponsorship was successful the workers and their families might contemplate permanent residency and ultimately citizenship in our country. It is hard to get the statistics on this, but between 40 and 50 per cent of 457 visa holders are applying for permanent residency in this country. I want to know why half of them do not apply and instead walk away from our country. It is important for us to understand if it is an issue of employer sponsors failing to meet obligations or if wages are not competitive with international alternatives or if it is simply that those families always intended only a temporary stay in Australia. Certainly the coalition will be looking much harder at how we can make sure these temporary, skilled workers are welcomed in this country and are more likely to stay.

One of our issues, which I just alluded to—and the member for Mallee, who is at my side, is only too familiar with this problem—has been that this government and in particular the Minister for Immigration and Citizenship, Senator Evans, have refused to work earnestly and quickly on issues of intervention or ministerial discretionary decision making. Right at the beginning of his period as minister he stated that he was concerned about interventions, which are a responsibility of the minister for immigration, and he commissioned the Elizabeth Proust report, which was put on his desk at the end of January. We have seen neither hide nor hair of this Proust report since then, but the minister has talked about how he would prefer that the department handled all individual cases where a person has had their permanency or their visa application rejected by a tribunal. Under our current system that rejection can then go to the minister for his final decision, according to his discretion. This minister does not like that; he has a problem with that. Therefore, when there have been cases on his desk of 457 visa holders, families—in one case Dr Moeller, who was working in a hospital in a small town in the electorate of Mallee—

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