Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

That was an extraordinary contribution by the previous speaker. I hear his frustration; I really do. But I would respectively say to the speaker that the federal government, of which he is a part, has responsibility for most of the areas that he claims are failing. The federal government has responsibility for that, not the state governments. If you are a member of the government and you don't believe your government is doing a good enough job, then perhaps the people you should be speaking to are the ministers who actually have the power to solve these things—if they have the imagination, the courage and the will to do it. Don't blame the states. Don't blame everybody else. Don't blame Labor opposition for it. Blame yourselves. You have the power to fix it.

This issue of migrant workers, particularly on farms, has been around for a while. I will only touch on it briefly because I want to talk about another group that is also being exploited at the moment. Way back in August 2017 there was a court case. I have an article in my hands here entitled, 'Hungry, poor, exploited: alarm over Australia's imported farmworkers'. It talks about people being here for six months and walking out of Australia with $150 in their pocket after virtually being exploited the entire time. Another headline, 25 April 2019, is 'Migrants trapped in slave-like conditions at Aussie farms'. Another media report, October 2020, 'There are no human rights here: inside the government's exploitative backpacker visa scheme'. Of course, they are talking about a federal government visa scheme there, not a state government scheme. So this issue has been around for a long time. If now it is causing people in the rest of Australia to wonder whether going to a farming community to pick fruit is a good idea or not, then that is on the government that has been in for seven years and that has not dealt with this in the way that it should have. They agreed to 22 recommendations and a few years later they have done virtually nothing. This is on the federal government.

Workers in the horticultural sector are not the only group of workers in Australia that have come from overseas for whom the government shows an extraordinary lack of regard. I'm referring here to the international students and the skilled visa holders who came to Australia because we needed them, just as the horticultural workers did. They came to Australia and contributed to our economy and our society by doing so and, when COVID struck, the federal government—and it is their responsibility—walked away. They walked away from people who had come to Australia—who had been invited to Australia, had been asked to come to Australia—for the benefit of us, and the government walked away.

Early on in the crisis, in late March and early April, Unions NSW surveyed 5,000 temporary visa workers. Sixty-five per cent of them had lost the job; 39 per cent did not have enough money to cover basic living expenses; 43 per cent were skipping meals on a regular basis; and 34 per cent were already homeless or anticipated imminent eviction because they could not pay rent. That was in March and April, and we are now a number of months further down the track. I am hearing every day from people who are providing food to international students. I delivered some food parcels about six weeks ago, and I found two-bedroom houses with three families living in them. These were people who had no work, having lost their work because mainly they were in hospitality, and students who had paid to be here who had lost their jobs, who were effectively homeless. One of those couples had a newborn. You come home from hospital with a newborn in a country that you thought welcomed you and you share a two-bedroom house with two other couples who also had four children.

This is the world that we are in now because this government has no regard whatsoever for the people that it asked to come here and that we needed to come here. Australia is so dependent on foreign workers. We are one of the biggest employers in the world. I want to give these figures because they are really interesting. This was 2018, We are a country of 25 million and the US, which is known for its foreign worker programs, is a country of 330 million –more than 10 times greater. We have 163,000 international students and they have 360,000, a little over double. They are more than 10 times our size with a little over twice the number of students. We have 397,000 temporary visas, including seasonal labour workers, and they have 724—not quite double. So we are a huge employer and a huge user of people who come from overseas. We need them to come here. We've invited them, and this government has no regard for them. I would ask them to consider how they would feel if their children—their 18-, 19- or 20-year-old children—had gone off to work elsewhere and they had been treated like this.

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