Damian Drum (Nicholls, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you very much. Last Tuesday I met with a group of fruitgrowers from the Goulburn Valley to discuss the lack of seasonal workers and the impact that's having on their businesses. The account given to me by one grower, Dash Sherif, puts it in a nutshell: 'This year, on average, pickers at my farm are picking nine bins of plums and apricots a day at $55 a bin. The average worker is making $495 a day. Picking starts around 6.30 and they knock off just after lunch. One farm manager sitting around the table picked 14 bins the previous day.' You can work that out for yourselves.

The workers are aware that there is a substantial shortage of pickers around at the moment. Now this so-called exploitation of the worker has turned into exploitation of the farmers. Now the fruit pickers who are available are, more or less, standing there telling the farmer how much they want to pick the fruit off the trees. So up to $65 a bin is now being put; otherwise, the fruit doesn't come off. These orchards, at the moment, are effectively manicured. The trees have been grown to be shorter. The crop, the yields, are the best—less apples, less plums, less fruit goes into fill each and every bin.

This failure from the Victorian government to supply fruit pickers for our harvest has been the greatest failure that I have ever seen of any government, ever. And now we have this exploitation of the farmers, it just rubs further salt into the wound.

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