Sam Birrell (Nicholls, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That this House:

(1) notes that:

(a) Jobs and Skills Australia Acting Commissioner, David Turvey, has said overseas agricultural labourers could be included under a new visa for lower-paid employees to fill workforce deficits; and

(b) the agriculture sector was in contention for the lowest-tier visa, announced after the Government's review of the migration system;

(2) condemns the Government for its treatment of the agriculture sector including:

(a) scrapping the previous Government's agriculture visa designed specifically to address labour shortages; and

(b) failing to address the labour shortfall estimated at 172,000 workers, putting a handbrake on production and profitability of agricultural businesses; and

(3) calls on the Government to introduce a specific agriculture visa to address the serious gaps in the agriculture workforce.

In August 2022, the Food Supply Chain Alliance highlighted the serious shortage of around 172,000 workers overall in agriculture. This figure was well understood when Labor held its Jobs and Skills Summit in September 2022. The leader of our party, the Leader of the Nationals, went to the summit in a bipartisan way, rolled up his sleeves—as they often are!—and said, 'If we don't face this together, we won't have a worker crisis; we will have a food security crisis.' And, more than a year on, that's where we find ourselves.

I'm so disappointed that Labor haven't managed to address this worker shortage crisis in agriculture in the time they've been in government. We had a solution prior; the previous government introduced the ag visa. That was, I thought, a very good solution, and it was well appreciated by those in the agricultural sector. Labor scrapped the ag visa but have come up with nothing to replace it. This private member's motion is an effort from me and others to implore Labor to get on with replacing the ag visa with something. You don't have to call it the ag visa; call it the 'Joel Fitzgibbon memorial worker entitlement scheme', going back to when Labor had people who cared about agriculture!

People know I'm from the electorate of Nicholls, which has a very proud history of developing agriculture, growing fruit and creating the dairy products that are enjoyed here and overseas and that contribute greatly to our export dollars. There are waves of immigrants who have come from all over the world to work; what happens is they come to Nicholls or the Goulburn Valley, which has been happening for over 100 years, to work. They get enough money and they buy their own farms, and then they employ people from other parts of the world who work hard, get enough money and buy their own farms. It's one of the most incredible success stories in Australia, and it leads to Australians having a better situation in terms of the cost of living. We grow our produce here. We grow it efficiently, and we have generally had high productivity in the agricultural sector. That means that, when you walk into the supermarket, you can find a cauliflower, a kilo of apples or a lettuce for a reasonable price. If we take the tools to produce that away from the farmer, those things either are imported or go up in price—probably both. That's not in the interests of anyone struggling through this cost-of-living crisis.

Labor has not been a great friend of agriculture since coming to office in May 2022. I would argue this government is the worst in terms of agriculture. The IR legislation is making it impossible for the PALM scheme to operate, for business productivity. There is the atrocious attitude to the Murray-Darling Basin Plan, ripping irrigation water out of production. There is the biosecurity tax, making farmers pay for their competitors to send products into this country to compete with them. The list goes on. We are 18 months down the track, with no dedicated visa in place. The dairy industry is struggling. The horticultural industry is struggling. All agricultural industries are struggling.

At the Senate food security inquiry last September, AUSVEG reported that 30 per cent of vegetable growers are considering leaving the industry within the next 12 months, while 72 per cent are currently experiencing workforce shortages. Imagine walking into the supermarket and we've got some Soviet Union type situation where the shelves are bare. None of us want that. It needs to be fixed by bringing in overseas workers to contribute to Australian agriculture and by a pathway to permanency, which is what the ag visa did. As I said, if you don't want to call it the ag visa, find something else to call it; I'll support it. But just get something in place so our farmers can do what they need to do, which is make sure that people working in the supermarket have got good, clean, affordable produce to ease all the other issues they're facing in the current cost-of-living crisis.

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