Ken O'Dowd (Flynn, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

It's a pleasure to speak on regional migration. I might refine my speech to things that affect my region and my electorate. But I think what affects my electorate is reflected across regional Australia. I sit on the Standing Committee on Agriculture and Water Resources, and, in the hearings of that committee, we speak to a lot of people across the nation, whether it be Darwin, Perth, South Australia, wine growing areas or citrus growing areas.

But it's not only the farming field that I'll talk about. It's to do with the shortage of doctors, allied health workers, engineers and skilled tradesmen like electricians. I wish the member for Hunter was still here. He would be very interested in that, coming from that background himself. There's a definite shortage of skilled tradesmen in regional areas, whether it be plumbers, builders and carpenters, all that type of thing.

Then you go down the semiskilled workers. There are shortages across meatworks, I know that Teys brothers came out last week and listed the different meatworks and abattoirs under their ownership. They had shortages of labour across the board in those particular meatworks. In my electorate there are packing sheds, and there's one guy at 2PH Farms at Emerald where the owner told me he was short of eight forklift drivers for the current picking season. You just can't get tractor drivers and those types of people, and consequently fruit is left lying on the ground. That is what will happen this year. This year is probably not a normal year with COVID. Some of the seasonal workers were here in Australia and they couldn't get out. There were others outside Australia who couldn't get in, and likewise with backpackers. Backpackers do supply an interesting labour force, whether it be working in country hotels or restaurants and coffee shops. They do a fantastic job too. With backpackers, I find that generally whatever money they earn they leave in the town. That's unlike the Seasonal Worker Program. I understand why: it's a form of foreign aid, actually. They work very hard but send a lot of their money home.

Australia's problem is that we have this unemployment of Australian people. There are a lot of people who say to me, 'Can't we give these jobs to Australian guys who are out of work?' Well, we can. More often than not it is offered to those people to work, but the work's in the regions and the unemployment is in the cities. Some cities, like Bundaberg and Wide Bay in Central Queensland, have an unemployment rate of 18 per cent. Yet we've got to rely on thousands of workers to come in and pick the fruit and that type of stuff. They just won't do it. The employer would like to employ Australian workers, but we just can't get them; and if they do get them, they don't last. So we've got a situation where we want to retrain, retain, and first of all, procure. In Gladstone in particular, the biggest city in my electorate, we just can't attract doctors. I don't know why. One of the reasons is that we haven't got the services that back up their skills. So they move to a bigger town like Bundaberg or Rockhampton or in fact Brisbane, where they have the backup services that they rely on to do their jobs.

Another problem we've got in the regions is the lack of transport. You must consider that some of these people who come to Australia come from a country where they don't need a car because there's that much public transport in the way of buses and trains. If you're living in the middle of London or Johannesburg you probably don't have a car, but you've got buses and trains. You don't know how to make a cup of coffee because there's always someone else there who can do it. India is a prime example of that. We do have a lot of Indian taxi drivers. Those sorts of people are prepared to drive taxis or run service stations. That's probably not uncommon in any area in Australia. But the immediate issue I've got today is that in Darwin, in just the last week or so, the territory government and the Australian government, the immigration department, had to get 170 workers from Vanuatu because the mango season has started in the Northern Territory. That will be full bore from now through to January. By that time, the Queensland mangos will be on stream, and we'll be wanting those sorts of workers. But, because of COVID, the borders are closed, so the orchard growers will have to work out with the state government and the federal government how to get these workers in. Then we'll have to house them for two weeks in isolation, before they go onto the farms. In some cases the farm will have this accommodation available, and in other cases they won't.

Today, in Emerald itself, in central Queensland, 500 workers are needed, and we're looking at whether they should go to the Northern Territory first and then come back to Queensland. I think the agriculture minister in Queensland, Mark Furner—some of you might now Mark; he was in the federal government at one stage—will have to wrestle with the problem of getting the borders open so that we can get the workers in, because if he doesn't get the workers in the fruit won't be picked. As farmers will tell you, their work is up to the picking stage, but if you can't pick the fruit then the whole crop will be lost. That's the problem we, as Australians, have got.

We also have to work through the hospital issues. As the member for Hunter said, these problems haven't just popped up because of COVID; they've been here all the time. This is what the report picks up. I hope that we can do something about it, because it's been going on for far too long. Australia is a lucky country, but we've got to support our farmers, who grow the food for our tables. These are the issues we must resolve or help them to resolve.

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