Adam Bandt (Melbourne, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to make a few brief comments in support of the Migration Amendment (Offshore Resources Activity) Bill 2013. I, like many others, was quite disturbed when reading the Allseas decision and understanding the implications of it. The essence of the Allseas decision of the Federal Court, which correctly applied the law, was that if you are working on a vessel that pulled up near but did not in some sense connect with an offshore resource project and then moved away again, you were not in effect covered by Australian law and therefore it made it harder to attract the protection of Australian labour law. That is a result that many people would have found odd: here we had, within Australia's exclusive economic zone, resources that are being exploited, and people could be performing work in connection with that, but simply because they never set foot on a particular project or they always stayed on a ship, they were not going to attract the protections of Australian migration and labour law. Of course, the consequence of that is that as soon as we start carving out, within Australia's economic zone, pockets where our law does not apply, you encourage a race to the bottom on wages and conditions. For some time we have been urging the government to act in relation to the Allseas decision, and I am pleased that the legislation is now before the House.

The intention of the legislation is one that no-one could object to, and that is that if we have labour conditions and standards in Australia then they should apply uniformly. It is a principle that I hold dear that there is no objection to people coming in from overseas and working here. But, firstly, we should be exploring to make sure that there is no local labour available to do it. Secondly, if having explored that there is no locally available labour then we have to make sure that the people who come here and work, especially on our projects, get the same wages and conditions as an Australian worker working alongside them. If they do not, it is bad for everyone. It is bad for the worker who has come here because they are probably in a situation where they do not know their minimum entitlements; they do not know how to access the basic rights that Australian workers have. It is also bad for the person working next to them, because you are introducing, as I said before, a race to the bottom when, because they are entitled to those basic protections of Australian labour law, they are always going to be undercut by someone else who can be brought in to work more cheaply.

For a number of years, having worked in this area of the labour law before entering parliament and since being elected, I have heard a number of quite hair-raising tales about what is happening, especially in the shipping industry. The shipping industry is, by its nature, very mobile. It is quite easy to bring people in from overseas, because that is what ships do: they go from one country to another. I have heard tales of people—engineers, for example—going to work on a ship to find that the crew had already signed up to an agreement before leaving their home countries, and that agreement covered conditions that were substantially less than the conditions that apply here, but that agreement was legally binding and that engineer could do nothing about it. That gave cause for concern.

The fact that a lot of this is happening in connection with our resources sector should be especially concerning, because these resources are owned by all Australians. You only get one chance to dig up these resources or extract them from the ground and they can only be sold once. Once they are gone, they are gone. We are entitled to a fair return on those assets, and Australian workers are also entitled to share in the benefits of those resources. One thing that always strikes me is how mean-spirited are some of the largest corporations in this country and multinational corporations. They have absolutely no problem aggregating profits to themselves, but when it comes to sharing those profits with the workers and the people of this country who also have an ownership stake, they are the first ones to say they want the right to find the cheapest labour from anywhere around the globe. I am pleased that this bill is being brought before the House, because I think it fixes a problem that became apparent with the Allseas decision.

One of the issues that I have with the bill is a technical issue. We will pursue this issue when it comes to the Senate. We will make sure that, with respect to operations within Australia's exclusive economic zone, this bill closes the loophole in the way that it purports to. In particular, we want to make sure that the problem identified in Allseas—namely, when you have a ship that might not touch another installation—that loophole is fully closed and these changes also cover people working on vessels dredging, for example, a step removed from the laying of the pipes, where they may be moving between what are counted as areas for the purpose of the bill. That will be a crucial issue for us when the bill comes before the Senate. This issue has been raised with the minister's office. I understand it is an issue that the minister's office will look at, and I thank the minister for agreeing to look at it. The Greens will want to see this issue satisfactorily resolved before the bill passes the Senate. It is something we can look at and discuss because it is really a technical issue that is completely consistent with the intention of the bill. I commend this bill to the House.

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