Page 3432 - Week 11 - Wednesday, 23 September 2015
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All Chinese applicants for subclass 457 visas, including electricians, cabinet makers, carpenters and motor mechanics will continue to be required to demonstrate the requisite skills, qualifications and experience to work safely in Australia.
The territory has a role to play here:
All such visa holders will continue to have to obtain any required federal, state or territory licences or registration to commence work in Australia and they will have to observe all applicable workplace health and safety laws and regulations.
I am not sure how the Chief Minister can say it will not change the FTA. It has been signed. It has been agreed to. He supported that. He tweeted that the Australia-China preferential trade agreement will be good for Canberra exporters. I note the word “preferential”. Indeed, in the discussion, in the statement he made to the Assembly, he said about the China-Australia free trade agreement:
The agreement presents major trade and export opportunities in tourism, education, healthcare and professional services sectors. Each of these fields present significant opportunities for the ACT’s private sector and research partnerships, and they complement the ACT government’s high-level priorities of transport reform, ongoing urban renewal and our continuing work to build Canberra as Australia’s premier knowledge capital.
I have not seen the Chief Minister anywhere else, until today, insisting that there be other legislation to apply labour market testing. The protections are there. Mr Barr’s amendment is seeking to set in place a legal exemption to an agreement that has already been signed. So how he can say it will not affect it is beyond me. Labour market testing is not applicable because the FTA does not preference Chinese workers over Australian workers and these concerns were not raised when we signed up with the Koreans or with the Japanese. I am not sure why it is so important here and now.
The amendment that Mr Barr is putting in place is nothing more than agreeing with the CFMEU’s position. I wonder whether this is simply a party room decision. What we have here is a chief minister who says one thing about China—it would not appear that he is totally fair dinkum about that, and I think that is a shame—but how are you going to attract trade investment this way when you say on one hand in a statement that this is a good thing but now, when we have a motion before the Assembly which says it is a good thing but let us make sure it continues to be a good thing, you suddenly start putting terms and conditions on it beyond the agreement?
Mr Rattenbury says it is an unhelpful insertion. It is not an unhelpful insertion. Mr Barr has very quickly picked up that most of the motion, as I said, was adopted from the things that he said in his report. I did that because I agree with him. And it was the Chief Minister who inserted it in his own report on the visit to Beijing, which praises the agreement, which says the agreement has had benefit, which says that the agreement gets us into places in China and gets us the sort of attention that we need. I will read out the paragraph:
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