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

My question is to the Minister for Agriculture and Northern Australia. Will the minister outline to the House how the Morrison-Joyce government has responded to labour challenges posed to agricultural industries and how the government will secure the industry's future by providing access to a long-term, reliable workforce.

David Littleproud (Maranoa, National Party, Minister for Agriculture and Northern Australia) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Nicholls for his question and acknowledge the challenges his electorate faced as a result of COVID-19 and the fact that agriculture has historically had to rely on overseas labour for its seasonal requirements. In fact, we have gone from just under 140,000 backpackers before COVID-19 to under 30,000 now. Of those, around 30 per cent worked in agriculture. So we saw quite quickly that there was a need for government to get involved in trying to keep the men and women here by giving them the opportunity to stay for another 12 months if they worked in agriculture, because we identified agriculture as an essential service as far back as March last year.

But we haven't forgotten Australians. Every one of these jobs must be market tested. Australians get first crack at these jobs. We've tried to incentivise Australians to take these jobs. We've created over $60 million worth of incentives to try to get Australians to move around the country and to pick the fruit and be part of agriculture. We've provided up to $6,000 in reimbursement costs to travel from one end of the country to the other. We've also tried to get young people to go out there and, in fact, given them an accelerated pathway to Abstudy and Austudy if they go and work in agriculture, to give them that independence, away from their parents, to be able to qualify for that to go back to uni. In fact, last week we announced another $5.1 million in a program to incentivise young Australians who are leaving school, as we speak, to get into agriculture and think about agriculture—not just from a seasonal perspective but also in terms of a long-term career.

We've also worked to ensure that those foreign programs have been reopened as quickly as they can be. We did that in August-September last year, when we reopened the Pacific schemes. There were over 25,000 men and women, from 10 Pacific nations, that we pre-vetted so they would be ready to come in. In December, the Prime Minister accelerated the process and removed the red tape to allow those men and women to come in. At national cabinet, he made it clear to the premiers and to the chief health officers that, if they gave the health orders by which, subject to quarantine, those men and women could come in, in addition to their caps, we would sign the visas. So we made it clear that we were going to get out of the way of that.

I'm proud to say that, from June this year, we've now started an agricultural visa in which we are in bilaterals with four nations, of which one, Indonesia, has made it clear that it is very keen to work through the process to sign up to provide an agricultural workforce, which is transformational. This is bringing in the next generation of migrants, because we are giving a pathway to permanent residency. This builds regional Australia. It brings the next generation of migrants to Australia to build regional Australia and agriculture.

But we're also working to ensure there are protections, and the immigration minister is bringing in legislation to protect workers from being exploited not only in the agricultural sector but right across the economy. We're also working with states, through the Attorney-General, on tighter regulations for labour hire companies. So we are working to put the environment and infrastructure around our farmers to continue to grow their industry to $100 billion by 2030.