About 2,500 Kiribati, Tonga, Vanuatu and Papua New Guinea residents will take part in a three-year trial announced by Australian Agriculture Minister Tony Burke.
They will stay for seven months of a year and receive award wages. Participating employers will pay half the return airfares.
Most, however, will be employed by growers in Griffith and Swan Hill who face labor shortages. But fruit and vegetable growers on Queensland’s Atherton Tableland, the Central Highlands and in a number of coastal centers, including Bowen and Bundaberg, are just as disadvantaged.
Their organization, Growcom, has pushed for four years to convince Canberra the only way to overcome the shortage is to admit overseas workers.
Growcom chief executive Jan Davis said the scheme seemed to be designed to address labor needs in the NSW and Victorian areas of the Murray-Darling Basin, where conditions were not representative of the industry-wide situation.
“Queensland produces more than a third of Australia’s horticulture crop, with an annual farm gate value of around A$2 billion ($1,745 billion),” Davis said. “We have the most widely dispersed production areas, the most diverse production base, and some of the worst impacts on labor availability from the mining industry boom. Our growers are keen to participate.”
The scheme — further details of which Prime Minister Kevin Rudd will give to the Pacific Islands Forum in Niue this week — has the backing of the Australian Workers Union, but the federal Opposition has reservations.
AWU national secretary Paul Howes claimed some “pretty grubby and horrible things” had occurred in remote areas where farmers had used illegal foreign labor in the past. “That’s why I support a system that regulates it,” he said. “If we don’t regulate through this scheme, the illegal practices will continue.”
Australian opposition foreign affairs spokesman Andrew Robb said the Rudd government has rushed plans to undertake the trial, and more public debate is needed.
