Julian Hill (Bruce, Australian Labor Party, Assistant Minister for Citizenship, Customs and Multicultural Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

I know. It's a strong competition. I'm thinking within my portfolio space. You know, keep it narrow. I don't want to go too broad. It's late at night. But the decision to uncap the work hours that international students could work to allow them to work unlimited hours turned our high-quality student visa—our premium student visa—into some kind of low-rent guest worker visa. It corrupted the student visa pipeline. We're still paying for that today, with the non-genuine students that the Morrison government let in, working their way through the ART appeals system and gaming it. We're still paying for that failure today. It's the same principle: if you let too many low-skilled workers in without the right safeguards, it actually drags down the wages of Australian workers. As we know, that was their policy.

This bill is another key step to strengthen protection for migrant workers that helps all Australians. The bill seeks to enhance protections by introducing a public register of approved work sponsors. It implements a commitment that the government made in the migration strategy. There's a sort of shock-horror routine from those opposite: 'Ooh, where did this come from? Who made this up?' Well, it was in the migration strategy. I know those two words would be unfamiliar to them because we inherited a complete and utter mess in the home affairs department. They'd sacked over 1,500 workers and destroyed the capability of the Public Service. Peter Dutton, Scott Morrison, the whole legacy, the whole cabal, were up there with the Australian flag behind them. They'd run out of Australian flags for every press conference. But when you look behind the curtain, when you look under the hood, there's no compliance. There is literally no enforcement going on in the Department of Home Affairs that we inherited. We did the migration review, we did the Migration strategy, we set out the things we're now implementing to tighten up the system and we're rebuilding the enforcement capability in the Australian Border Force—and that's a proper agenda. This bill is the next step. It complements the register of sanctioned sponsors published by the Australian Border Force.

I thank the previous speaker and acknowledge something I haven't heard before: he read out one of my press releases. I've never met anyone who has read any of my press releases, so I'm very grateful to the member who spoke.

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