Michael McCormack (Riverina, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I listened to her in silence, so the member for Kingsford Smith can give me the same courtesy, and I'll get to you in a minute. She cannot come in here and start talking about racism in the coalition. She cannot make allegations about nuclear when it's not mentioned in the Migration Amendment (Combatting Migrant Exploitation) Bill 2025. And she cannot come in here and talk about exploitation of migrant workers and blame the coalition. That's just a bridge too far. I had a good relationship with Brendan O'Connor, the member for Gorton's predecessor. He's a good man, and I'm sure you're a good person too. Brendan was often very bipartisan in the sorts of things that he brought to this parliament and in the sorts of ways that he wanted to make a better Australia. I wish him well in his future and I also wish you well in your parliamentary career. But don't just take the talking points that Labor gives you and think that that's the way to proceed with a debate.

What the coalition did in nine years—not 10 years but nine years—of government was make sure that they protected workers, and not just migrant workers, to ensure we had a fairer Australia. There's no better place to see it—I understand that your electorate is very multicultural. That's fantastic. So too is the Riverina, whether it's the Riverina that I first represented in 2010—which included the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area, which I think is the cradle of multiculturalism in this country. So many people went there—pre World War II, but particularly after the Second World War, when the great mass of migration came out from Europe after the guns had fallen silent in 1945—and made a better life for themselves in regional Australia.

I understand and appreciate that the member for Gorton mentioned the regions and I commend her for that. Because it's the regions that are crying out for migrants, Member for Gorton. They truly are. And the sad reality is that we recently had a productivity summit that was headed up by the Treasurer, the member for Rankin. I think what we need in this nation right now is a planning and population summit. I think we need to do much better across the aisle when it comes to seeing where our migrants go. Because, all too often, they are going into the western suburbs of Melbourne and Sydney, and they're not reaching the regions where they're crying out for skilled labour and crying out for unskilled labour. They're not reaching out to those places. I appreciate there are measures in place that are put there by—I see the member for Parkes at the table. He's Assistant Minister for Resources and Assistant Minister for Agriculture and he knows about this. He represents more than half of the New South Wales landmass. And in western New South Wales, just like in the Riverina, they want migrants, they welcome migrants, and they celebrate migrants. So for the member for Gorton to suggest that coalition members are in any way racist is, I think, a bridge too far.

In Wagga Wagga, my home town, the largest celebration of the society—after the Wagga Wagga Gold Cup horse race, which is on the first Friday in May—is our FUSION BOTANICAL multicultural festival. It celebrates the food, culture, dance, music and attributes that migrants bring to our city. It's the largest inland city in New South Wales. You were right when you said, in one sense, that some migrants were exploited, but it wasn't the fault of government. There are some higher firms which do do the wrong thing, and they deserve the full force of the law brought against them. They deserve the immigration department raiding them—whether they're doing the wrong thing by farmers or the farmers in some cases are doing the wrong thing by migrant workers, and some of them do. Let's not beat around the bush about this.

I'll tell you one thing that Labor did do, which was, I believe, antimigrant. They changed the rules around the Pacific Australia Labour Mobility scheme. What that did, as Labor tried to unionise that scheme, was force farmers to pay for work that was never going to be done by trying to even out the number of hours and extend the number of hours such that they would pay migrant workers money when there wasn't the work there at all. We know that farming work is so seasonal, whether it's in crop production, horticulture—whatever the case might be. The biggest losers out of that were not necessarily the farmers, who stopped employing the migrants; they were the Pacific workers themselves because the work stopped and the farmers turned off the tap. Labor brought this in, they tried to unionise the scheme, and it fell foul of the people that they were purportedly trying to help. They were the workers themselves, the PALM workers, those magnificent people who come here and do the jobs that Australians simply won't do or can't do.

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