Opposition rejects 457 visa rort claims April 29, 2013 - 5:47PM Claims of 457 visa rorts are just a desperate attempt by the federal government to draw attention away from its border protection failures, the opposition says. On Sunday, Immigration Minister Brendan O'Connor said breaches of the foreign worker visa program had been so serious that legislative change was needed. Breaches of the scheme could "exceed over 10,000" cases, Mr O'Connor said. But opposition immigration spokesman Scott Morrison rejected the claim. "If there are abuses in the visa system, of course we should put the resources in place to ensure those abuses don't occur," he told Fairfax radio on Monday. But what the government is doing here is just a desperate attempt, late in the day, to try and distract attention from border protection failures. It's as simple as that. Asked if the tone of Labor's asylum seeker and foreign worker policies harked back to the days of the Anglo-supremacist White Australia policy, Mr Morrison said the Liberals had abandoned that policy five years before their political rivals. "The Labor Party has always had those elements that have tried to cling on," he said. I'd hoped that we'd got well past that. There has been a bipartisanship over the past few decades about the importance of skilled migration to Australia and that ended when Julia Gillard and Brendan O'Connor started trash-talking skilled migration. Western Australia's Chamber of Commerce and Industry was critical of the government's planned crackdown on 457 visas, saying the program was an important tool for businesses and had served the national economy well in recent years.