Two Pacific Islander farm workers have admitted sexually assaulting teenage girls in two separate attacks in northern New South Wales and Far North Queensland.
Samoan seasonal worker Agaalofa Agaalofa, 27, pleaded guilty to four charges of sexual intercourse without consent and a charge of assault on the first day of his trial at Coffs Harbour District Court on Wednesday, after previously denying raping a 17-year-old girl on beach her Arrawarra, NSW, in November 2023.
He changed his plea after a jury heard evidence from the victim, and the Crown Prosecutor detailed how the girl was walking along the beach when Agaalofa, a stranger who was living in a caravan park taken over by fruit pickers nearby, approached her, The Coffs Harbour Advocate reported.
Agaalofa pushed her into the sand, ripped off some of her clothes and raped her four times. He then spat in her face, resulting in the assault charge.
The court heard Agaalofa was only caught because the victim did her own “detective work” and tracked her phone that he stole to Pacific Islander fruit picker accomodation in Grafton.
Agaalofa, who needed a Samoan interpreter in court, was remanded in custody and will be sentenced in November. He has been behind bars since his arrest in January.
A day earlier Vanuatuan fruit picker Claude Kalo, 32, pleaded guilty in Cairns District Court to indecent dealing with a child under 16 and engaging in unlawful penile intercourse with a child under 16 after spending 562 days in custody on remand since his arrest in Mareeba in March last year.
The crime was not detailed in court, but Kalo’s victim, a stranger, was described as a “vulnerable child”. Kalo was sentenced to time served by Judge David Kent KC, who noted that the “two instances of sexual contact including internal ejaculation” had a “significant” effect on the child, The Cairns Post reported.
The court heard he intends to return to Vanuatu immediately unless detained by Home Affairs.
The Arrawarra rape sparked anger in the region at the time, with local residents complaining they were “living in fear” of the hundreds of Pacific Islander fruit pickers working for berry giant Costa Group and two labour hire firms.
“It’s been ongoing trouble — fights, drunkenness, trespassing, breaking into people’s homes,” a spokesperson for the Little Arrawarra community action group told News.com.au at the time.
“We are outnumbered probably three-to-one by the labour workers. It’s like the Wild West, these big six-foot-three Pacific Islander blokes on this rampage. It’s supposed to be a dry site, it’s absolutely not. They are, for want of a better word, shitfaced most of the time.”
Four months before the rape a concerned resident wrote to the Coffs Harbour mayor, warning: “As recently as last weekend my 13-year-old daughter can no longer go to the beach on her own.
“She has been followed, watched and tried to be spoken to by the older male fruit pickers living in the park. We will call the police next time, because there will be a next time.”
As of July this year there were 30,475 workers living in Australia under the government’s Pacific Australia Labour Mobility (PALM) scheme, down from 38,000 in December 2023 but up from 6,700 in 2019.
Header image: Left, Claude Kalo (Facebook). Right, the fruit picker accommodation at Arrawarra (Little Arrawarra).
