Labor has responded to concerns from farmers about its plans to slash British and European backpacker numbers by telling them to bring in unskilled Pacific Islander labourers instead.
Immigration minister Tony Burke last week announced a series of migration reforms, including a crackdown on working holidaymakers, who are mainly from the UK, France, Germany, Ireland and Italy, in order to bring net overseas migration down and counter the rise of One Nation.
The changes will mainly affect Nationals-held regional seats where backpackers seasonal farm work, and Labor is believed to have targeted the Working Holiday Maker Program rather than other visa classes in order to avoid upsetting ethnic minority voters in metropolitan electorates.
National Farmers’ Federation President Hamish McIntyre called the crackdown “a low blow”, but Employment Minister Amanda Rishworth shrugged off warnings about food security and prices rises, and said farmers should look to immigrant workers from the Pacific.
“Look, I don’t accept the premise of what’s being put forward. We have taken a responsible approach to migration, a sustainable approach to migration,” she told ABC News Breakfast on Friday.
“Backpackers in their second and third year will have to work in regional areas. There is also a number of other places that people can get agricultural workers. And I’d point to the PALM scheme, a really important scheme that’s potentially underutilised.”
Mr Burke made similar comments, telling ABC’s 7.30 the PALM scheme could take care of any worker shortages caused by his migration reforms.
They’re right to be concerned about agricultural workforce. And as I said before, there is no part of the economy where you can have an impact on immigration without having some tension there,” he said.
“But I’d say this for the agriculture sector, the government has a Pacific worker program called the PALM Visa. It’s really important to us as a government, and it’s been really effective in our relationship with the Pacific. That area is still underutilised.”
The Pacific Australia Labour Mobility scheme allows Australian businesses to recruit workers from nine Pacific countries and Timor-Leste for unskilled, low-skilled and semi-skilled positions when there are not enough local workers.
The scheme covers short-term roles of up to nine months, and longer-term ones of between one and four years, and in July this year there were 31,840 PALM workers in Australia, working for 558 approved employers, mostly in the agriculture and meat processing industries.
The number of PALM workers has nearly doubled under Labor, which in 2024 introduced a pilot program allowing participants to bring their family members to Australia.
The PALM scheme has been criticised for causing social problems in regional areas in NSW, Victoria, and in Queensland in recent years, and workers have been responsible for a series of horrific crimes, including rapes and a fatal amputation.
A Samoan fruit picker was jailed in December for raping a teenage girl on a beach near Arrawarra on the NSW mid north coast, where local residents said they were “living in fear” of hundreds of PALM workers housed at a caravan park shanty town, citing a rise in violent incidents and sexual harassment.
In Red Cliffs, south of Mildura, locals said an influx of PALM workers from Vanuatu had made them feel unsafe, and reported alcohol-fuelled violence, shoplifting, obscenity, noise and intimidation towards female shop staff.
In June, a crackdown on illicit tobacco distribution and migrant worker exploitation in Innisfail, Mareeba, Atherton and Dimbulah in Far North Queensland in June identified PALM workers who had left the scheme and were living and working illegally in Australia.
Under Mr Burke’s changes backpackers will be required to take part in a ballot system for second and third year places, which will be reduced from 57,000 to 45,000, and 31,000 to 5,000 respectively, along with extended visa processing times.
Header image: Left, working holidaymakers in Queensland (Ayr Backpackers). Right, John Yalu, who was jailed in May for killing an elderly man by amputating his leg with a circular saw in a public park in Far North Queensland (Facebook).
