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

The member for Werriwa has read one of my press releases! You can talk about that, too, when you get up.

The previous speaker mentioned that it was a deep surprise that there'd been a sanctioned sponsor named and shamed. Well, I say genuinely to the member: the legislation has been operative for a bit over a year. It takes proper process and time, and natural justice. You've got to be fair to the employers. You've got to do the investigation. Actually, let's go back to basics: you have to put the money in, employ the staff, train the staff and then send them out. You have to have public servants to go and do the enforcement—also a shocking concept, given the tens of thousands of staff they stripped out of the Public Service; there was almost no enforcement capability left in the Department of Home Affairs. I say to the member: in addition to the naming and shaming of that sanctioned sponsor, there are legal worker warning notices, compliance notices, enforceable undertakings, prohibited employers, employer sanction infringements, nonvoluntary location and human trafficking referrals—so there's been a whole range of sanctions put in place that the staff now working in the Australian Border Force are able to employ, and in many cases are employing.

This bill comes as the latest part of a package of reforms to address migrant worker exploitation. We've put in place a range of pragmatic measures that focus on strengthening the legislative framework available under the Migration Act and the enforcement capabilities of the department and the Australian Border Force to address employer noncompliance. That includes enhancing protections to encourage temporary migrants to report exploitation and resolve workplace issues in a timely manner.

The Migration Amendment (Strengthening Employer Compliance) Act amended the Migration Act with the following measures—I will outline a few of them for context because they work as part of a package. This is just the latest part of the package—and, to quote the member for Moreton, from last night, we like a big package! It's good reform. There are three new criminal offences targeting employers and others in the labour chain for misusing migration rules to exploit temporary migrant workers; a new power to prohibit employers found to have engaged in serious, deliberate or repeated exploitation of temporary migrants from employing additional temporary visa holders for a period; increased penalties for breaches of employer obligations under the Migration Act; and new compliance tools, which are the ones I touched on earlier—compliance notices and enforceable undertakings—to support a proportionate response to the issues of noncompliance.

I'll close where I started: the vast majority of Australians would not morally put up with migrant worker exploitation. It's a thing you hear about in the media, but some of these most vulnerable human beings living in our society on insecure visas are incredibly vulnerable to exploitation. It is that threat that rogue employers—most employers don't do this; most employers are decent—can make, using that power imbalance to coerce a vulnerable employee, be it through wage exploitation or sexual exploitation. As I said, Border Force, with these powers and resources, are now making reports every year of suspected human trafficking. We have a very clear agenda as a government to raise the wages of Australians. Part of that is indexing the minimum wage that employers have to pay migrant workers, and part of that is stamping out migrant worker exploitation.

Debate interrupted.

See this speech in context