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

I want to acknowledge a report entitled Out of the Shadows that has recently been released by Associate Professor Joanna Howell from the University of Adelaide. In this report, she tackles the very real issue of undocumented workers. She says that the pandemic, the crisis that we have at the moment, may be the opportunity we need to regularise the status of these undocumented workers. Who are these undocumented workers? This report says undocumented farm workers are migrants who may be working in the agricultural industry without the entitlement to work. This includes migrants on visas without work rights, such as tourists; migrants who have visas that have expired; and migrants who have valid visas with work rights but who work in breach of the conditions of their visas.

Professor Howell talks about the National Agricultural Workforce Strategy and the fact that they have strongly recommended that the government introduce this one-off regularisation process for undocumented farm workers. It is estimated that there are somewhere between 60,000 and 100,000 undocumented workers who are currently in Australia and have been in Australia for many years. They form a critical part of the harvest workforce, but they still haven't been enough to help our farmers through the last six months.

The substantial presence of undocumented workers can no longer be ignored, and Professor Howell talks about four compelling reasons why. Firstly, if we have between 60,000 and 100,000 people in Australia who effectively don't exist in terms of the medical system then they are going to be unable to come forward to receive a vaccination for COVID-19. So there is going to be a whole cohort out there who will be too petrified to go anywhere near any type of medical centre to get the jab and, therefore, this whole cohort will be unvaccinated. If we are serious about vaccination, we need to look at regularising these people.

The second reason is that incentivising undocumented workers will help our labour shortages. It is not going to create more people, but, by giving these people legal status, you are going to enable them to work from farm to farm, to cross the borders and to become much more efficient and effective. This improved mobility will be a huge boost for the horticultural sector, which has been so let down by the Victorian government.

The third reason for this one-off regularisation is the need to stop exploitation. People who are opposed to overseas workers continually raise the concept of 'we bring these people out here and they get exploited'. We already have people out here that don't exist, these people without status. The opportunity for them to be exploited is absolutely rife. We need to acknowledge this. We need to acknowledge that these people are here. Whilst the vast majority of farmers who are using undocumented workers are doing the right thing—paying them correctly and organising every other payment that they would normally have—it does create the possibility that these people will be exploited.

The fourth reason to introduce a one-off regularisation is simply the crisis that we have on farms right now. Hundreds of millions of dollars has been lost due to the fact that states decided to close their borders with a couple of days notice. Obviously, Australia has closed its borders to the working holiday makers. What we have now is this urgent and immediate labour crisis. By doing this right now, surely it would create an efficiency that would be a significant boost.

As of early February, losses were listed at $45 million and that has certainly increased now. We now have the situation where many farmers are being exploited by pickers who are standing in front of them and demanding that they be paid 60 to 70 per cent over and above the normal accepted wage for fruit picking. The exploitation has totally swung around and we need to act, as a government, to bring these people into legal status.