Don Randall (Canning, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Local Government) Share this | Hansard source

This is certainly about the bill because it is about the compliance regime that this government has put on industry right across Australia. This is where we are going. As the learned member across the chamber asked about the bill, I will go further to the bill.

One of the compliance factors is the imposition of a mandatory training requirement for 457 visa holders. The government also introduced legislation which effectively meant that two per cent of an employer's payroll tax had to be spent on training if they had overseas or temporary overseas workers. This is a new thing. The 457 visas worked. We as the coalition do not say that everyone should have a 457 visa worker. I have been vocal in the party room—as my colleague from Brisbane will tell you—and I have got up there and said: Australian workers first—train our young kids. We should be training our young kids in Australia and upskilling them first. At the end of the day, every now and then you are going to find a situation where you need a specific set of skills, and these people are sourced quite often on temporary visas called 457s. Combined with the introduction of the temporary skills migration income threshold, the cost to Australian business of employing temporary overseas workers has become prohibitive.

I wish to bring to the attention of this House—and I alluded to this last year—one of the crazy things in my own electorate that this compliance did. Borrello Cheese in my electorate sought to bring in a specialised cheese maker. Borrello is very good at their specialty cheeses. It is a family-run and owned business by Vince and Teresa Borrello. They are a couple of people of Italian origin who came here and set up this marvellous boutique industry. They are famous for their bocconcini cheeses, which I am sure, you would know, Deputy Speaker Scott. They are beautiful with tomato and a bit of basil and a bit of drizzled balsamic vinegar. It is some of the nicest cheese you will come across. Because they have got the whole range of cheese there, they decided to mentor and upskill their workers. As none of them had been to any courses, they would get a specialist Italian cheese maker from Italy.

They had a lot of help in this because they were blocked all the way along. Even Nick Catania, former state Labor MP, was helping Vince and Teresa eventually find a Mr Pelati, an Italian cheese maker, whose qualifications were right. His English was correct, not to mention the fact that he was enthusiastic and keen to get on with the job to help the local people employed in that cheese factory grow the business.

Vince and Teresa did the right thing: complied with the visa, paid for his transport, medical costs, set-up costs et cetera. All of a sudden he got a letter from DIAC saying that he was going to have to leave the country. It was rather strange, because they could not understand why a junior officer from DIAC in Perth had said that Mr Pelati was going to have to leave the country.

It was not until I went to a senior case officer who was very good and explained the difficulties in this area. A Mr Robert Bailey explained what the difficulty was. We know that this is a roadblock that has been put in the way of people employing people, because of the infiltration and interference of unions who do not want to see any outside workers, particularly if they do not belong to one of their unions.

Mr Bailey from DIAC said, 'They've got to pay this levy.' He initially said it was a one per cent levy, which was going to cost $8,890—nearly $9,000—a year to have this cheese maker stay in Australia, but it had to go to a registered training organisation. There are no registered training organisations in Australia that have cheese makers—not one. So they had to find someone to give this money to. Lo and behold, they ran into another roadblock. It was not one per cent at all; it was two per cent of your payroll tax that had to be spent on training—not on the training of the workers in Mr Borrello's cheese factory; he had to find a registered training organisation in Australia that he could give this $18,000 to.

He eventually thought he had found somebody in Melbourne that might put his $18,000 towards training but, at the end of the day—

A government member: Couldn't they find anyone else?

No, they could not find anyone suitable. Eventually, after the anger and the angst, Mr Pelati said, 'What's going on with this silly country of yours? I've come here to make cheese and you're in my way. You won't let me work.'

They eventually found a place at New Norcia near Gingin north of Perth and they got this windfall gain. When the training authority got the $18,000, they said, 'What's that for?' They said, 'We don't know. We just have to give it to someone, so we're going to give it to you.'

So they gave them $18,000. Mr Pelati got to stay, but here is the rub: Mr Pelati wanted to be paid well for his specific skills and he wanted a good salary, so they negotiated an above-award salary. Sorry, you cannot work unless you are on the industry award so he said, 'I'm not taking less. I'm leaving,' and he went back to Italy.

After all that, mess, thank you very much for your compliance and your interference, DIAC and everyone else, the Borrellos went back to making their own cheese and not having to pay more than the one-off $18,000. So the compliance and the interference that is involved in these sorts of regulations is unnecessary.

If you are chasing illegal workers, yes, fund DIAC to go and investigate and hunt them down properly but do not get in the way of business from doing a proper job of making a profit and employing people who want to grow the business and further culturally enhance something like the Borrellos were trying to do in this country. I rest my case.

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