Kelvin Thomson (Wills, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Quite possibly the worst case of intergenerational theft is the way that the full employment of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s has been allowed to disappear and the generations to come have been left with lives blighted by job insecurity. Unemployment in Broadmeadows, Melbourne, just to the north of my electorate, is higher than Spain and equal to Greece. As the Victorian member for Broadmeadows, Frank McGuire, points out:

Youth unemployment in a community with twice as many Muslim families than any other Victorian electorate living side-by-side with Christian refugees from Iraq and Syria is perilously high—estimated above 40 per cent.

He rightly says:

One of the best anti-radicalisation strategies is a job that helps connect the disconnected.

In Australia job insecurity is being needlessly generated as a consequence of massive migrant worker programs.

In Australia we have unemployment of 800,000 and many more people underemployed, or on Disability Support Pensions, who would work if work opportunities were there for them. At the same time, as the member for Dobell correctly pointed out in her remarks, we have over one million people in Australia on temporary entry permits which give them work rights—over one million!

It is claimed that employers need these migrant workers to do jobs which Australian workers are not qualified or willing to do. The workers are supposed to enjoy salaries and working conditions as good or better than those which Australian workers doing the same work would receive—but the reality is totally different. There are hundreds of cases of exploitation of temporary migrant workers. They are particularly vulnerable to exploitation. Their continued stay in Australia essentially depends on their employer's ongoing approval and many of them, as the member for Dobell also pointed out, aspire to achieve permanent residence in Australia.

I will cite three which were brought to public attention in February 2015 by the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union and which illustrate on-the-ground reality as opposed to the theory used to justify 457 and other temporary work visas. The cases involve the food producing company Manildra. At MSM Milling two Filipino workers were held captive, by two Filipino managers, in a house for a day before being allowed out to buy food. At the Nutramix plant at Narrabri, eight Filipino workers were working 10 hours a day, six days a week, for as little as $10 per hour. Six were living in a one-bedroom house and two in shipping containers. They were dismissed from their jobs and forced out of their accommodation in the town in the middle of the night. At the Manildra sugar and starch plant at Bomaderry, 16 Filipinos and 13 Chinese workers were paid as little as $4 per hour and made to work seven days a week.

For years now, I have been drawing attention to the potential for abuse of temporary migrant worker programs. The fact is that there are many millions of people—perhaps hundreds of millions of people—living in poorer countries who would live in Australia in a heartbeat if they could. This understandable aspiration leaves them wide open to exploitation and abuse. They are prepared to come to Australia as temporary workers and work for much less than Australian wages and under much poorer conditions than we regard as acceptable in this country. Sometimes this is because the wages, while undermining Australian standards, are much higher than what they would receive in their home country. Sometimes it is because they believe that being in Australia will give them a foot in the door, they will not have to return to their home country and they will achieve permanent residence—and the member for Dobell made the point about surveys which backs this up.

This fundamental dynamic undermines the whole concept of temporary migrant worker programs. In theory, the workers should not be exploited. In theory, Australia's standards of pay and conditions, workplace health and safety, and the like should not be undermined but in reality they are. I have been raising this issue for years but there has been far too little action to address it. As a consequence, we have reached the shameful state of affairs which has led to this bill.

What this bill does is to outlaw employer sponsors being paid by foreign workers for a migration outcome. You would think that this would be unlawful already, and that such an abuse could not happen, but you would be wrong. The independent review into integrity in the subclass 457 program found that some sponsors in the 457 visa program have been paid by visa applicants in return for a visa outcome. Sometimes this is initiated by the visa applicant. The worker offers the employer an inducement in order to receive a visa. On other occasions it is the employer sponsor who initiates the rort—for example, by paying the worker less than they are entitled to receive or requesting separate payments in return for continuing as a sponsor.

Remarkably, the government has no specific powers to take legal action against such payment for visa activity. This bill will change that. It will make benefits that are asked for, received, offered or provided in return for a migration outcome unlawful—about time. We need to be fair dinkum about addressing fraud in the visa system, so I certainly support the bill. I note that there are other recommendations in the 457 review aimed at restoring the integrity of the 457 visa program which the government has not yet implemented.

I am aware that there is a Senate inquiry into this bill and that it is currently due to report about now. It may be that this bill can be strengthened and made more effective with amendments that go to other aspects of the misuse and abuse of 457 visas. I believe we need to do much more to stem the widespread abuse of 457 visas.

One of the key drivers of intergenerational unfairness is the bringing in of temporary workers from overseas to do work which Australians, and young Australians in particular, should be doing. It is often unfair to the migrant workers themselves. Workplace audits by the Fair Work Ombudsman show that one in five migrant workers in Australia could be underpaid or in jobs they should not be doing. In some cases the workers have been underpaid tens of thousands of dollars. The Fair Work Ombudsman reported in May that in the last three years it has dealt with over 6,000 requests for assistance from migrants on work visas—6,000! They now account for one in every 10 calls to the agency for assistance and have become a major focus for the Fair Work Ombudsman.

At the end of September, Fairfax media reported a joint investigation with Monash University that revealed hundreds of thousands of temporary workers at any given moment were being exploited and underpaid in a widespread black economy for jobs. In food courts, in cafes, in factories, on building sites, in hairdressers and in retail shops right around the nation, hundreds of thousands of temporary workers are being ripped off. A staggering 80 per cent of foreign language advertisements were offering wages below legal rates. Many of them were openly advertised as 'black' jobs.

The Liberal government's non-reaction to this widespread abuse was pathetic. Minister Cash said that 'any proposal to regulate the operations of labour hire companies is best driven by the industry'. Industry self-regulation is code for do-nothing. It has manifestly failed to stop the rorts now and it will not succeed in future. The Liberal Party does not care about migrant workers. It wants to bring as many of them as it can into Australia so employers can exploit them. It turns a blind eye to the racism of the free market. It is the rankest hypocrisy and deepest of ironies that causes it to cry 'racism' and 'xenophobia' at the unions and community groups who are doing their best to put a stop to this exploitation.

There is nowhere near enough scrutiny of 457 visas and other migrant worker programs to stop the exploitation of workers or to safeguard Australia's best interests. In May 2015 the Sunday Age reported that an Italian national was allowed to enter and stay in Australia on a 457 visa despite close family links to an Eastern European crime syndicate that has been under investigation by the Australian Crime Commission and Australian Federal Police. He has since been charged with drug smuggling, rape and indecent assault.

The Department of Immigration and Border Protection has not made or required background or criminal record checks for the tens of thousands of foreign workers who have entered Australia since the 457 visa program began nearly 20 years ago, in 1996. While applicants must declare whether they have any criminal convictions, the department does no checking. Indeed, the focus has been on 'deregulating' and 'streamlining' the 457 visa program, meaning the safeguards against abuses are negligible. At the end of May 2015 there were over 106,000 holders of 457 visas in Australia—way too many for the department or the Australian Federal Police to know what they were doing or how they were being treated.

One of many disgraceful temporary migrant worker scams which has attracted recent publicity has been the treatment of workers at the 7-Eleven retail chain. In September, Adele Ferguson and Sarah Danckert in The Age reported that 7-Eleven franchisees were charging staff up to $7,000 to help secure Australian work visas as a sideline revenue stream. I certainly hope that this bill will put an end to such abuses. The Age reported that some franchisees are running as one-stop recruitment shops, providing a steady stream of heavily indentured students and other workers into 7-Eleven stores.

Workers on 457 visas and foreign students are part of the visa factory scam being operated by some 7-Eleven franchisees. The franchisees charge workers anywhere from $25,000 to $70,000 to sponsor them on a visa. Sadly, this is only the first part of the rip-off. Some student visa holders are then enrolled in courses at private training colleges associated with 7-Eleven franchisees. Fairfax reported that one 7-Eleven franchisee is a campus manager of a private college based in the small office of a migration agent above a shop in the Sydney CBD. The franchisee is reported to have offered places in his education courses, which enable the worker to obtain a student visa, for a $40,000 fee.

What is going on is that the student visa holder enrols in a course at a vocational education institute with links to 7-Eleven franchisees and then works at 7-Eleven or another business run by the 7-Eleven franchisee. The 457 visa holders are sponsored by franchisees to work at the franchisee's store or another business linked to the franchisee. As is now well known, 7-Eleven has not only been the home of an education scam and a migration scam but also been the home of a workplace scam. Workers have been paid for only half the hours they work, which is of course a breach of 457 visa conditions. Students work more than 20 hours a week, a breach of their visa conditions which causes workers to fear repatriation and keep quiet about their exploitation. This scam was not isolated. Potentially thousands of workers have been underpaid millions of dollars by rogue franchise operators. It is all too clear that the 7-Eleven head office turned a blind eye to these scams until Four Corners exposed them publicly. There was systematic wage exploitation and falsification of payroll records of thousands of workers.

We have indicated our support for the measures in this bill, but we want to highlight that there are potentially further integrity measures in relation to temporary work visas, and subclass 457 in particular, which could be included as part of this bill. For example, we could see a new sponsor obligation to ensure that the cost to the sponsor of any training contribution cannot be passed on to a 457 visa holder or third party; an obligation that sponsors be required to include as part of their signed employment contract a summary of visa holder rights, prepared by the department, and the Fair Work Ombudsman's Fair Work Information Statement; and a change to 457 visa conditions introduced to place an obligation on the visa holder to provide the department with their Australian tax file number. There are additional integrity measures for temporary work visas more generally that I think this parliament should be debating.

In summary, Labor supports this bill but will be considering the findings of the Senate inquiry into this bill and consulting further with stakeholders before the debate in the Senate.

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