Graham Perrett (Moreton, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Education and Training) Share this | Hansard source

I'm pleased to speak in support of the motion moved by the member for Lyons. Whilst the federal electorate of Moreton doesn't have a lot of farms, we do have Brisbane Markets, where a lot of the produce picked around Queensland and northern New South Wales goes through to be sold. The other reason I'm particularly interested in this topic is because I have a significant Korean community and Taiwanese community, and many of the backpackers who have come previously are Korean or Taiwanese and are supported by my community. In fact, I have been on two trips with representatives from those communities to talk to Korean and Taiwanese and other backpackers in and around Bundaberg and in the Lockyer Valley, because there were many tales coming in of people being exploited over the years.

As we've heard from other speakers, a significant part of the Australian economy relies on these migrant workers coming on these short-term visas. They make up about 80 per cent of the harvest workforce, which employs around 40,000 backpackers in an ordinary year, I concur with speakers on both sides who would like to see more Australians doing this work.

I come from St George, which the member for New England was talking about, and I did farm work for most of my life from grade 10 on. That was what paid my way through university. It is hot, hotter than hell, up to 44 or 45 degrees, and it does make for long days doing that work. I can understand why people would not want to make a career of it, but we have to get that balance right. Obviously there is something that will always make these jobs more attractive—I think it's the market mechanism that involves paying workers more money. I believe that has been trialled over the last 5,000 years or so, and it seems to be an effective way to increase the number of people willing to do a job. But, I know that it is difficult.

The COVID-19 pandemic has made this an extraordinary year. Obviously the Prime Minister shut the borders very early in the piece, and that meant those travel restrictions are a problem for our farmers who do rely on those 40,000 backpackers and others. There are obviously fewer of them around. And we did have that horrible situation where the Prime Minister said to these people, 'Go home'—I think they were the actual words out of his mouth. I don't think more damage has been done for the Australian travel product than when the Prime Minister actually engineered the So Where the Bloody Hell Are You? campaign. That was a horrible thing for a prime minister to say and no message to give to people who are often our best ambassadors when they return to their countries. Whether it be the Pacific island countries or others—and I know the member for Berowra touched on this in his contribution—that soft diplomacy is important so that we use all of the things we have available to make sure that we make our region stronger and interconnected, because there are some other nation states that don't always have the best interests of Australia at hand, obviously.

That Ernst & Young report seems a long time ago, but they were saying we'd need an extra 26,000 workers. Things have moved on so much since then. They made that projection thinking that the global labour market would open up in March. Well, things have not gone that way at all. I know that worker exploitation is a problem and, to the farmers' credit, I will say often it is an intermediary. We actually heard people were more likely to be exploited by someone from a dodgy labour hire company that spoke the language of the worker who arrived from another country rather than the farmer. I think some farmers did close their eyes to what was going on in their fields, particularly when it came to some of the horrible working conditions and the exploitation. As the member for Berowra suggested, we do have some industrial cops on the beat, but it's hard to get the information in the hands of the workers. It's hard to put the industrial rights in their hands, and the horticultural award is a difficult award. We even had The Sunday Mail in Queensland totally misrepresenting what the piecemeal rate in the horticulture award is on the front of The Sunday Mail. So people can easily get this information wrong, particularly if English is your second language.

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