Lisa Chesters (Bendigo, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

The member for Riverina is right: I will address worker exploitation in the agriculture industry at some point in my remarks today. But first I want to talk about how hopeless the design of the former government's ag visa was. There is a very good reason why no workers were ever granted entry into this country under that visa. It is because, when they designed it, there were fundamental flaws. It was a moment to politicking to try to buy off the farming community as opposed to really delivering for them. This visa was a free-for-all. This visa was proposing that a country could enter into an agreement with Australia and allow workers in to work in agriculture, but they weren't tied to an employer and they weren't tied to a region. All they had to do was enter this country and say they would work in agriculture. That was it. They could go anywhere. We had to take it on good faith and value that they would work in agriculture. It's not going to fix your labour problems on farms if all they have to do is tick a box on their way into our country.

International students, to enter the country, have to demonstrate before they enter the place that they are enrolled to study. If people are employer sponsored to enter the country, they have to demonstrate who they're going to work for and show proof of that. Under the design of the agricultural visa, they didn't have to demonstrate that. Farmers—you're right—did not want to be connected to these workers, so they left that out of the visa design. So there's a very good reason why the former government did not let anyone in. We know how bad and unscrupulous these labour hire companies are in the agriculture industry. I've met workers who've come into this country, thinking that they're going to work in higher education, thinking that they're going to work in the city, only to be picked up at the airport in a black van and driven all the way to Wagga Wagga or driven all the way to somewhere else, dropped off at a caravan park and told: 'We've taken your passport. You are going to be working on this farm until I come pick you up.' People are literally trafficked here. We have seen through report after report people tricked into working out in the regions.

How many media, government, and committee reports does the opposition have to have received? Blueberry pickers are being paid less than $4 a day to pick blueberries. Strawberry workers, people picking tomatoes—when we talk about horticulture and the exploitation of temporary migrant workers in this country, it is just mind-blowing that we have not done more to protect them. Yet the agriculture visa didn't offer any protection to those workers. How in good conscience could any government continued to have that visa on offer given the treatment of workers in this country? Clean-up needed to happen.

I remind those opposite that no visa applications were received or granted within the program prior to the swearing in of the Albanese government on 23 May 2022. So why are we here are debating this? You want to keep a visa that no workers entered the country on. What's the point of that? You're offering false hope to farmers to try to fix their labour hire problems. We should be working with the farming sector to improve the PALM scheme, making sure that it is working and flexible. We need to ensure that any worker coming here, particularly to work in agriculture, has protections. There's a reason why backpackers are reluctant to go to the bush. It is because of the experience of other backpackers, who don't have to wait for the media reports to tell us that working in agriculture is not only a tough job; it can be a very dangerous job and we have seen far too many examples of backpackers being exploited, and they are now choosing not to go to the bush, which is tough for those who do the right thing.

I should say that we know it is not all of the farming community and the farming sector who mistreat their workers, but there is that old saying: a few bad apples do disrupt the applecart. That's the problem that we have. Workers don't want to work in agriculture because we haven't cleaned up the seedy bottom, and the agriculture visa does not fix that. The fact that we have an opposition that are still trying to push it means they have not learned from their mistakes. They've not learned that the reason they didn't grant any visas is the flaws within the visa. If you're serious about helping the farming sector, then you would work with the government, the unions and with the sector to improve the PALM program.

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