Luke Gosling (Solomon, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak about the Interim report of the inquiry into the Working Holiday Maker Program. Obviously, there will be a final report to come, but it was important in the face of the COVID-19 crisis that the committee report on the very important questions relating to: the value of the program to Australia's economy, including tourism, health care and ag sectors; the ongoing impact of COVID-19 nationally and internationally on the program; the potential economic impacts on regional economies due to the disruption of access that working holiday-makers relied upon, especially for the ag and tourism sectors; the capacity, if any, for Australians made unemployed by COVID-19 to fill the labour shortage, among other issues; whether existing visa criteria and conditions related to working holiday-makers are still adequate and appropriate to address the purpose of this program; and the extent to which the program can support economic recovery in regional Australia.

Labor proved again that it was working constructively in getting this interim report on a very timely question out as soon as possible. I will not go into detail on the interim report, but I would like to note the recommendation that the government develop a 'Have a Gap Year at Home' campaign, appealing to young Australians' patriotism to undertake regional work after year 12. The report noted that it would provide young people with work experience opportunities at a time of stiff competition for a diminishing pool of jobs. Strengthening the patriotic sentiment of younger Australians to teach them resilience and discipline and develop social cohesion is a principle I absolutely support, and that should form part of our economic and social recovery from COVID-19 in some way.

I'd also like to note and support recommendation 4's subpoint, which suggests that working holiday-makers' visa conditions extend the northern Australia provision, allowing work in hospitality, tourism and other industries to apply in all regional, rural and remote areas. This is vitally important to NT growers. As I speak, hundreds of workers from Vanuatu are literally saving the mango harvest in the Northern Territory, which is valued at over $128 million. To give you an idea of how great the demand from agricultural producers in the NT was, the local mango industry footed the half-a-million-dollar bill to charter these workers to Darwin. To these workers, our Pacific friends and neighbours, I say thank you, or Tangkyu tumas, on behalf of all Territorians.

There is an ability for more seasonal workers to come from Vanuatu. It would be good if the federal government provided some assistance by way of supporting the quarantine of more numbers of seasonal workers, because the estimate of the sector was that about 600 seasonal workers were required to pick the mangos this season. We have got a lot fewer than that. The pilot has been conducted. What should happen now is that all the pickers that we need are able to come, quarantine and get onto the farms.

Indeed, it's not the first time this year that Australians have said thank you to our Pacific friends and family. Our Pacific neighbours were of course there when the bushfires gutted Australia's east coast last summer. Papua New Guinean troops were there, hundreds of them, with 900 others offered to deploy to fight those flames. Papua New Guineans were there for fire ravaged towns like Merimbula, where I have family, which received $60,000 in donations raised by some Papua New Guinean youths. Vanuatu was there for us with its support of $250,000 to families. I say this not in passing nor as an unrelated tangent but as a matter of national relevance and importance that we can and should never forget.

Programs like the Seasonal Worker Program and the Pacific Labour Scheme are popular for a reason among all stakeholders. The Australian farmers in the first instance, like in the Northern Territory, need practical solutions to chronic skilled labour shortages, particularly in ag. The workers, who in this instance are Vanuatu workers—currently some 170 are in the NT—can make up to nine times the minimum wage in Vanuatu to pay for their children's school fees or education or, in other cases, build their own homes. Their families and communities benefit from the positive economic effects, which have been extensively demonstrated. And they strengthen the ties between Australia and Vanuatu, Timor-Leste and other Pacific island countries at the level of deep personal friendships and connections.

There are legitimate and very important concerns around protections for workers, be they backpackers or Pacific islanders. Some of the working conditions have been known to fall far short of Australian community standards. Labor will always stand up for workers. So protections for workers will never be waived away by this side of the House.

Such programs could be scaled up in future, and there is certainly support and demand from Australians who benefit immensely from the vital support that these programs provide to their businesses. This was especially urgent in the face of the labour shortage triggered by COVID-19 and the hasty departure of over 50,000 backpackers—imperilling the $14.4 billion horticulture sector. The interim report proposes ways to bring down barriers to make these programs more attractive for working holiday-makers, by enjoying more certainty and being able to move across state borders. These proposals are worthy of consideration, as are those for solving chronic labour shortages in the regions, especially in agricultural, by drawing on the talent, skills and patriotism of young Australians looking for an adventure. These are not mutually exclusive propositions but, rather, are elements of a more comprehensive and lasting national response, which we in this place owe to all Australians who draw immense benefit from these schemes and who look to us for leadership.

I want to make a bit of a confession in rounding out my speech, and that is that I made a commitment to various members of this place that I would bring down some Northern Territory Kensington Pride mangos to this sitting of the House. Unfortunately, I got a bit busy before flying down here and wasn't able to do that. But, I will make sure that I do so for the October sittings. I will be going around to the office of the chair of the House of Representatives agricultural committee to offer him some. I enjoy working with him on his agricultural committee. We are doing important work at the moment around forestry plantations. He knows, as I do, coming from somewhere outside of Sydney—and no offence to the honourable member here from that fine city—that sometimes the challenges of working, living and running businesses in regional areas of Australia are not fully appreciated.

We saw that this week when we had the unfortunate situation where the government has been tussling with itself about whether to ensure fair representation for Northern Territorians. Like other regional parts of our country, the people of the Northern Territory have needs and challenges, and they deserve to be respected in this place. They deserve to have fair representation. So I look forward to the Senate vote tomorrow on fair representation for the Northern Territory. I also look forward to that bill, having passed the Senate, that other place, coming across to the House of Representatives where it can be passed. The passing of that bill will guarantee fair representation in this place for Territorians.

I thank all those members who are joining with the people of the Northern Territory—those who don't consider Territorians to be second-class citizens but consider them to be full members of the Australian Commonwealth. We look forward to that bill passing the House of Representatives tomorrow, guaranteeing fair representation for Territorians. The challenges and the opportunities in regional Australia are immense. So we don't want a situation where what happens in this place is only representative of people who live in major capital cities on the east coast; we want a situation where what happens here is representative of the whole Australian Commonwealth. By doing that, we will make our nation a stronger, more productive nation—and that's in the interests of everyone who's represented in this place.

John Alexander (Bennelong, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Before I commence with my contribution, I'd like to thank my colleagues for their wonderful contributions to the condolence motion for Susan Ryan. They were really worthwhile. What a great team—Labor at its best—in this time.

COVID has hit many industries hard, as people have stayed home and away from shops, venues, airports and more. But, while we sit in lockdown and think of the places we can't go, it's easy to forget that we are largely cut off from the world and that people can't come here. While holiday-makers wouldn't be able to patronise those shops, venues and airports either, there is a group of people who we need to come here—namely, working holiday-makers. Our farmers depend on working holiday-makers to pick their crops, and, in turn, we rely on them to keep the fresh produce in our supermarkets and one of our larger trade exports running. We need to look at this problem with flexibility and practicality but also urgency. The Joint Standing Committee on Migration has been looking at this issue for a few months now, working feverishly to gather evidence and to examine potential solutions. I believe we will bring forward our full report in the coming months, but this late stage of the season has forced us to bring forward this interim report to specifically address the problems that farmers are facing now. I would like to thank the chair, the member for Berowra, and the co-chair, the member for Calwell, for conducting this inquiry so well and having the flexibility to allow us to deliver the solutions that people in the bush need now.

The committee has settled on 10 recommendations. Many of these recommendations relate to short-term payments, incentives and adaptations to existing arrangements like JobKeeper. These are excellent recommendations, and I recommend them to the government. The recommendations I'm most proud of are the ones that hope to change the culture around working on farms and young people's attitude to travel. Recommendation 1 states:

… The Committee recommends that the Government urgently develop and implement a 'Have a Gap Year at Home Campaign' to attract young Australians, particularly the current cohort of Year 12s and university graduates, to undertake regional work. The campaign should:

We have a great cultural institution of travelling overseas for a gap year borne out of an outdated mentality that we are in a far corner of the world and that culture and wonderment is something that can only be found on foreign shores. But those notions that Australia is the land that culture forgot are old-fashioned and obsolete. Our grey nomads have discovered the wonders of the Australian bush, and we need to encourage young Australians to explore our own backyard. Doing some work while exploring it is an integral part of any gap-year experience, giving new insights into life on the land and a full appreciation of how this country works. Aside from the romantic element of getting out onto farms while seeing Australia, there is a practical element to this too. Just as holiday-makers can't come here, there are thousands of young Australians whose gap-year plans for 2021 are in tatters, as the world keeps its borders shut tight. Why not encourage the people who can't leave here to pick up for the people who can't get here?

A similar theory has informed recommendations 2 and 3, which look to help regional unemployed people into work on farms. From eight-year lows last year, regional unemployment has now soared, as has unemployment across Australia. While obviously not everybody will be capable of doing the work, there must be large numbers of people who would be able and willing to work on farms at this time. It could even be the leg-up into longer-term employment that could get people off government support sooner and more permanently. If the jobs are there and the workers are there, we must look at ways of connecting the two. This can be done through helping the bureaucracy assist people to find those jobs, which is addressed in recommendation 9, or creating the carrots and sticks to encourage people to take up that work. We've looked closely at making that carrot sweeter through allowing continued access to JobSeeker while working on a farm or providing a payment to cover travel and accommodation costs. With some long-term unemployed, we may also have to look at making the stick tougher but always understanding that there are some people who are just not cut out for work on the land. It has been excellent to see the speed with which the government has been working on these recommendations since this interim report was tabled only weeks ago.

Last night, the budget reported $17.4 million over two years to assist individuals to relocate to regional areas for employment opportunities, including for short-term agricultural work of up to at least six weeks duration. Modifications will include temporarily removing the waiting period to provide all jobseekers in employment services access to assistance to relocate to take up full-time, ongoing employment. This is the sort of speed and flexibility that our government will be remembered for and is why Australians are faring so well in this pandemic when the countries we normally compare ourselves with are faltering.

Thank you again to the chair of this committee, my committee colleagues and the team at the secretariat—especially the team at the secretariat for putting together this report. I commend this interim report and look forward to seeing the finished document in the coming months.

Julian Hill (Bruce, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Overall, I commend the report. It's not 100 per cent perhaps what any of us would have written, but I think it's a good example of bipartisanship. We worked through it together, and it was broadly agreed across the committee and has a series of, if implemented, sensible recommendations. It is perhaps a peculiar report if you pick it up thinking you're going to read about the Working Holiday Maker program, which of course is a pre-eminent cultural exchange program for the nation, because predominantly the report talks about regional labour shortages. So the colloquially named 'backpacker visas' and the recommendations go all to pretty much how we could plug the agricultural and regional labour shortages.

It's not widely understood, I think, in the Australian community—certainly amongst many people in the city—just how dependent a lot of agriculture in regional Australia, and other industries indeed, have become dependent on temporary migrant labour. This visa is one of many important visas. About 84 per cent of working holiday-makers now in Australia actually work. They don't have to. I know a lot of Australian kids go overseas on similar equivalent visas, because these are reciprocal exchanges in many cases, and don't work. They go for holidays and backpacking and tourism. But 84 per cent of people in Australia on working holiday-makers work in some form, and indeed, since I think 2005 and 2016, when changes were made in both years, there are now significant incentives on people on working holiday-makers to stay for longer and go and do regional work for a period of time. So these industries have become increasingly reliant on working holiday-makers and temporary migrants to do this kind of labour.

The inquiry heard significant and very serious evidence about the growing labour shortage in these industries, and it's not something we can ignore. Between March and June this year, the number of working holiday-makers in Australia fell from 140,000 to 70,000. In just three months, we saw 70,000 backpackers—colloquially called—leave the country without the corresponding flow coming in. The National Farmers Federation said, 'industry will be confronted with a labour crisis, the likes of which it has never seen before.' The regional labour shortage is serious, growing and urgent. Hence, the interim report quite reasonably focuses on this issue.

There is no single solution. I think of it like a jigsaw puzzle, and it's not our job as a committee, as other speakers have said, to put together some kind of answer. Migration is not the sole answer. It's not our job in the migration committee to give the government a plan or a proposal to deal with this crisis. But there are some pieces of the jigsaw which I think we can offer.

I'll just put on the record: there are many reasons why it is hard to get Australians to do this work. It's hard work. It's physically hard work. It's often isolated from the population centres. It's low pay. It's not great pay given the sort of manual labour involved and the hours involved. And the sector, unfortunately, as we've seen over many years, is rife with exploitation. Now, I say that trying to be balanced. There are many employers trying to do the right thing. There are many farmers trying to do the right thing. But everyone knows that this sector—agricultural labour in particular, and some of the dodgy labour hire companies that proliferate finding workers for this sector—exploit people, and it's got that reputation. But also, of course, it's seasonal. There are peaks and troughs, so it's always going to be inherently difficult to get solely Australian workers to come and go at the right time. So there's a natural fit with temporary migrants, who do come and go from the country and often look for short-term work.

I think the solutions, as has been touched on by previous speakers, fall into a few different categories. There are solutions which you might call domestic. In that regard, the gap year, the idea of saying to students finishing year 12 or students finishing university, who might have been looking at doing a gap year overseas, or entering employment in the case of people finishing TAFE or uni, who are looking at the employment market or looking at their inability to travel—it makes perfect sense that we'd say to those young people, 'Hey, have you thought about having a gap year in Australia, or at least a gap six months? Take some time, see another bit of the country and help out with what is a serious national labour shortage, and you get paid to do it.' That is a good option. It's not going to see tens of thousands of young Australians, I believe, flooding to do this work, but with the right promotion and the right effort from the government and the right incentives, it may fill part of the gap and be part of the solution.

In that regard, I see that the government has announced some incentives around HECS and Newstart and so on. Their previous efforts regarding incentivising people on Newstart have failed. They've failed because they simply didn't recognise the economic reality that an extra two or three grand is simply impossible for someone trying to survive on Newstart to pay their rent in the city—often they're in the city—to keep paying their bills in the city and nick off to the country for two or three months and try and pay for accommodation there. It just doesn't add up. So the recommendations we made as a committee were more open ended, trying to recognise that the government's previous efforts have just failed. They weren't well designed. The government has responded, and time will tell whether those domestic incentives actually work or not.

There's then a series of recommendations, which the member for Solomon and others have touched on, around incentivising working holiday-makers who are here to stay longer and continue working. That's a good thing. They're already in the country. We don't have the quarantining border issues, predominantly. There's a bit of stuff about moving between states, but if we can incentivise them to stay and do more work in the sectors where we need them, that's a good thing.

Then there's a series of very interesting recommendations which effectively look at what you might call other temporary migrants. We had a range of evidence from various sector or industry stakeholders, as well as the Migration Institute of Australia, who quite reasonably pointed out that there's a range of temporary migrants already in the country who we could be drawing on. Of course I should also have acknowledged the role that the Seasonal Worker Program and our Pacific Island friends have played, which the member for Solomon touched on.

I want to make a couple of remarks about these other temporary migrants. I think the recommendations are quite thoughtfully crafted. We've suggested, for example, that we could look at incentivising international students who graduate, many of whom want to stay in Australia on the 485 visa, not all but some of whom are pursuing or seeking a pathway to permanent residency. Frankly, they're scared at the moment, when they look at the graduate employment market, thinking, 'I'm chasing my dream of contributing to this country; I've paid a fortune for my education, a high-quality education; and I don't see the possibility of getting the professional employment that I need in the next year or so in a graduate field. What am I going to do?' This would be a great option, at least to provide them with an option where they could do some regional work, then hopefully come back on that 485 visa for a longer period and still pursue the pathway they were seeking. That's quite sensible.

There was what I would call a nutty suggestion from labour hire firms saying that we should let all international students go bush now and they can just study online. I'm glad we didn't recommend that. I think that would open up the most enormous rort you can imagine, if we said to all international students, 'Go off and try and do your studies from a shearing shed while you're picking fruit.' It might be convenient from a labour point of view, but it fundamentally undermines the international education sector and what we should be on about in this country. If you come to this country to study—the pandemic aside—you should be studying as much as possible in classrooms. Otherwise, why are you here? We're just selling a work visa, and that's not something we should tolerate.

In closing, there were also some suggestions around other temporary visas. There was a sensible suggestion around the temporary skilled visa. Generally, if you're on a temporary skilled visa you're restricted to work for the same employer, but the suggestion is that we could relax the conditions to allow people who've lost their jobs because of the Morrison recession, the pandemic, whatever you want to call it, allow them to work for another employer. That makes sense.

There are a couple of things that we haven't got in here at the moment. We should have a bit more about the exploitation and the Fair Work Ombudsman, but perhaps we can address that in the final report. There's one thing in here which was touched on in the evidence but which is not in the recommendations, but I do think there's an opportunity. That is to help farmers by incentivising a certain cohort of refugees to do this work.

We still have in this country 3½ thousand people, who arrived and were found to be genuine refugees, who are existing on SHEV visas, the safe haven enterprise visa. They were sold a pup, basically, in 2014 by the now Prime Minister. They were told: 'If you go to regional areas on this SHEV visa, then you will have a pathway to permanency.' Well, 3½ thousand of them did that, and not one of them—in six years, not one of them—has got a permanent visa. We've also got 14,000 people who arrived by boat—over 10 years ago in some cases, but certainly over seven or eight years ago—who are on temporary protection visas. These are people who've been found to be genuine refugees who exist as a permanent underclass in this country. I have thousands of these people in my electorate. After the suggestion that the Refugee Council of Australia made, when it said: 'What if we let some of these people go and do this work in return for a permanent visa?', I've been contacted by numerous people saying: 'Where do I sign? I will go tomorrow. I simply want to be able to secure my future in this country. I've been here for 10 years—at what point will the government let me be Australian?' And I think that's a sub-optimal position. These people have been here for 10 years: I believe they should just get a permanent visa. But it's not a bad suggestion—it's a pragmatic suggestion—that would help at least some of them. In that regard, I hope that in the final report, whenever it's released, we see some progress and some recommendations on this.

I want to commend the member for Bennelong and the member for Nicholls, a Liberal Party member and National Party member, for publicly—in the committee hearing and out in the media—saying this is something we should look at, or, indeed, calling for it. And I know privately, from conversations with other National Party members of parliament, that there's also growing support for this. I hope that we can find a bipartisan solution to this problem.

Federation Chamber adjourned at 18:17