Alice Jordan-Baird (Gorton, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak in support of the Migration Amendment (Combatting Migrant Exploitation) Bill 2025, put forward by the Minister for Home Affairs, and I commend him for doing so. I'm not sure about the member for New England's frankly confusing and somewhat offensive comments before me. He, like his party, wants to continue creating friction and heat in multicultural communities across our nation. But I am honoured to follow my friend the amazing member for Barton and commend her for her dedication to protecting the rights of migrants through her work as an employment lawyer and every day in her role in this parliament.

At its core, this amendment bill is about the value that migrants bring to our nation—a nation shaped by generations of migrants who came to Australia in search of opportunity and a better future. From the Sydney Opera House to the West Gate Bridge, the very bridge that connects my community in Melbourne's western suburbs to the city, it's migrants that built the Australia we all enjoy today. The contributions migrants have made to this country have often come with great sacrifice. For too long, migrating to Australia to work has meant low wages, few protections and an uncertain future. In a country where, apart from our First Nations brothers and sisters, we all have migrant ancestry, where even today almost half of us have a parent born overseas, the fact that migrant workers have not been adequately protected and have been subjected to exploitation, coercion and wage theft is shameful.

Our government does not tolerate the exploitation of migrant workers. I'm a proud member of the Transport Workers' Union and I'm thrilled to say that, after years of campaigning, the TWU, supported by legislation passed by our government last term, has struck a deal with Uber Eats and DoorDash. These companies will provide workers with minimum pay rates, injury insurance and protection against unfair dismissal by algorithms. Migrants make a huge contribution to the gig economy. This work supports them while they study and train and allows them to work and make a living while adjusting to a new home. They deserve to be properly protected in this work, and our government is determined to support them in this.

The amendment bill before us now is another piece in this broader project to support migrant workers. It delivers on a commitment we made in the Migration strategy:getting migration working for the nation, from 2023, to enhance protections and oversight for these workers. The bill will establish a public register of approved work sponsors, which will be publicly available on the Department of Home Affairs website. The register will include the name and type of approved sponsor, the sponsor's ABN, the postcode associated with the approved sponsor's ABN and the number of sponsored workers and their occupations. The inclusion of the employer's postcode in particular will enable migrant workers considering changing sponsors to identify employers nearby, ensuring that the register is fit for use. With this register, it will be easier for migrant workers to check whether a sponsoring employer is legitimate and to find a new sponsor when exploring alternative employment opportunities, giving them the resources they need to be better informed about potential employers as well as greater mobility should they need to find a new employer. It's a simple reform that will make a big difference to the power imbalance between migrant workers and their employers.

Too many temporary migrant workers who provide much-needed skills and labour to Australian businesses find themselves underpaid and subjected to poor conditions. In 2023, the Grattan Institute reported that one in six migrant workers were paid less than the national minimum wage and many endure unsafe working conditions and harassment. In 2016, the ABC reported that 7-Eleven workers were being paid as little as 47c an hour. They were made to work more than twice the number of hours permitted by their visa conditions, and they were physical intimidated when seeking repayment.

Since then, the exploitation of migrant workers hasn't stopped. In December last year, the Fair Work Ombudsman found that workers at a sushi franchise had been underpaid more than $650,000. The franchise was ordered to pay more than $15 million—the highest penalty ever secured by the Fair Work Ombudsman in a single legal action. Most of the workers who were underpaid were working holiday-makers and skilled visa holders, and many of them were young people aged under 25. Migrant workers put up with these conditions because they are afraid of jeopardising their visas, because they haven't been told what their rights are, because they don't know what to do when they are underpaid, because they don't know how to check if their employer is legitimate and, sometimes, because they are being threatened by employers. It isn't fair and it isn't right, and that's why our government won't let it stand.

When we came to government we took decisive action to start eradicating this exploitation. In 2023, we introduced a package of measures targeting employers seeking to exploit migrant workers and ensuring workers could speak up without fear of reprisal. These measures made it a criminal offence to use a person's visa conditions or status to exploit them in the workplace. Because of these measures, dodgy employers can now get up to two years of jail time for this conduct. We also introduced prohibition notices, increased penalties and new compliance tools to deter and punish this conduct by employers, and we repealed section 235 of the Migration Act which made it harder for temporary workers to report exploitation. To ensure these laws have real power, we committed $50 million to the Australian Border Force for enforcement and to promote compliance with these regulations, and we carried out a month-long blitz, inspecting around 300 businesses to check compliance. That was on top of the 140 businesses we sanctioned for bad conduct in 2022.

In 2024, we brought in the Migration Amendment (Strengthening Employer Compliance) Act, which introduced three new work related offences addressing coercive practices used by employers to exploit migrant workers. In March this year, we launched a $13.25 million grant program to educate temporary visa holders and their employers about our reforms. This piece builds on the systemic changes we've already made in this space, making sure that migrant workers have the right information to make informed choices about their sponsors and can find a new sponsoring employer more easily, reducing their susceptibility to exploitation.

This issue is not so far from my electorate of Gorton. Not long ago, a constituent of my electorate came into my office distressed at the refusal of her application for an Employer Nomination Scheme visa. She had been an employee at her place of work, a small business, for several years already, but her visa application had been refused twice because her employer had failed to pay her at the same rate an Australian worker would be paid for the same work and had abrogated their sponsorship obligations to other workers. This constituent was distressed at being left with no choice but to leave the country despite having done nothing but work hard and support this small business during her time in Australia. These are the challenges faced by temporary workers of our country—temporary workers who have been left at the mercy of their employers, who've had little control over their lives and who've had no choice but to bear the consequences of their employer's indiscretions.

At its core, making sure that temporary migrants are protected from exploitation is a matter of fairness and human dignity, because everybody should be paid properly for the work they do, and nobody should have to endure mistreatment, coercion or exploitation. It's also about making sure that wages stay strong for all Australians. Wage theft is fundamentally anticompetitive—a race to the bottom. When migrant workers are underpaid, it drives wages and conditions down for everyone. It erodes institutions that make Australia a good place to live and work, like our world-leading minimum wage, and it harms employers doing the right thing. It means that employers are faced with a difficult choice—whether to pay their workers the lawful amount and sacrifice market share or join the race to the bottom. By making sure that migrant workers are paid properly for their work across the board, employers don't have this incentive to reduce wages, protecting the wages of all Australians.

It's about making Australia a place where people from other countries want to work. For our economy and our future, Australians need migrant workers. According to the peak body for the building and construction industry, every building and construction trade is currently deemed to be in shortage. To address the current housing crisis and ensure that we have the housing we need for the future, we need skilled labour from overseas, particularly in rural and regional areas.

Shortages of skilled workers like cooks and chefs are also presenting an ongoing challenge. In 2022, Jobs and Skills Australia reported that 66 per cent of employers experienced difficulty filling hospitality roles, and an article by the ABC reported that businesses, particularly in rural and regional areas, are having to decrease operating hours to cope with persistent skills shortages.

Of course, shortages like these have more than one cause and require multifaceted approaches, but temporary migrant workers are an essential part of the picture to plug these gaps, reduce the pressure on these industries and keep small businesses afloat, ensuring that our economy keeps moving forward and that we maintain and grow the industries that are critical to our future.

As we discuss what migrant workers have to endure in our country, I'm proud again to be sitting on this side of the House and not that side of the House. Time and time again, those opposite have failed in their responsibility to protect temporary migrant workers from exploitation. Not only did they preside over worsening conditions for temporary migrant workers in this country, failing to actually implement the recommendations of the Migrant Workers' Taskforce they created, which responded to the revelation that 7-Eleven's mistreatment of some migrant workers essentially amounted to slavery; but they also actively prioritised temporary visas over permanent visas, changed visa rules to restrict workers rights and removed pathways to residency, actively degrading workers protections and leaving them vulnerable to exploitation.

At every opportunity to demonstrate support for migrants, at every opportunity to show that they know the value of migration to our country, they've done the opposite. The comments made by those opposite about migrant communities during their last term of government don't bear repeating. You would think that, after their decisive losses in 2022 and, again, this year, they'd have realised that vilifying migrant communities and dog whistling to the far right doesn't play with Australians. But, no, they've persisted with this divisive rhetoric. With racist and offensive remarks, they've validated and legitimised the blaming of migrants for social issues instead of working with the government collaboratively to address the real causes of these problems—problems we're only dealing with today after 10 years of neglect under their leadership.

Blaming migrants is what a party does when they don't have real solutions to the issues we face as a nation. We know the coalition doesn't have real solutions. We knew it during the election campaign when they proposed solving the transition to clean energy with billion-dollar nuclear fantasies. We knew it when they proposed solving the housing crisis by reducing the number of international students in higher education and VET. We knew it all the 10 years they were in government, during which they reduced emissions by a meagre three per cent, ignored our ageing population and deemed it unnecessary to appoint a housing minister. We know it now, as they ditch net zero and let migrants take the blame for the consequences of their neglect.

Once again I'm proud to be on this side of the House, where we tackle the issues head on and where we treat migrants with the dignity, care and respect they deserve and actually listen to them and their experiences as members of our Australian community. Last week, Minister Thistlethwaite and I held a migration forum. It was held in my office and was attended by leaders of multicultural communities in my electorate. The forum was productive and insightful. It was an opportunity to ask questions and gain insights on parts of our migration system that were less well known. It was also a chance to share information about how the system works in practice and identify opportunities for greater cultural sensitivity and understanding.

I'm so proud to represent one of the most multicultural communities in the country, and every day that I represent my electorate I'm reminded of the value that migrants add to our community, whether it be in skills, in the insights they bring, in the ways in which they lift each other up and model close-knit, supportive and welcoming community or in the culture they share—food, language, celebrations and knowledge. This amendment recognises the value of migrants. It recognises that they deserve to feel safe and secure as a matter of human dignity but also as people who add immense value to our communities, who have an important role to play in our future and who are welcome in our country. I commend this bill to the House.

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