Sam McMahon (NT, Country Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

[by video link] I rise today to talk about our recently announced Agriculture Visa. This has been a long-held initiative of the Country Liberal Party and the National Party, and I am very glad it is going to come into effect from the 30th of this month. It will complement our existing Seasonal Worker Program, which has been so vital and so successful in the Northern Territory. It will rely on us having bilateral agreements with the countries that we are going to invite these workers to come from, and I hope that these bilateral agreements will be able to be brought into play, nutted out and agreed to very shortly to allow Territory producers and farmers to take advantage of the Agriculture Visa.

The next part of the puzzle is that we need to be able to have quarantine arrangements, particularly during COVID, for these workers. It has been a struggle, even under the Seasonal Worker Program, to get the Northern Territory government to agree to quarantine arrangements. I'm very glad to see that 160 people have arrived from Vanuatu, who have gone into quarantine for their two weeks and will be available for the Northern Territory mango harvest. But it was disappointing that one of our biggest producers, Katherine based Nino Niceforo, had to have his workers quarantine in WA because the Northern Territory would not make places available for them.

We, the federal government, have done the heavy lifting here. We've provided the visas. We've provided the programs. All we ask of the states and territories is that they come to the party and support their people in agriculture—their farmers, their producers—by providing places for these workers to be able to complete their quarantine so that they can go onto farms and produce vital food.