Luke Gosling (Solomon, Australian Labor Party) | Hansard source

The Albanese government understands the importance of the Pacific Australia Labour Mobility, or PALM, scheme to our Pacific family and to the Australian producers that benefit. That's why we are growing the scheme. When our government came to office, the total number of PALM workers in Australia was just over 24,400. In the October 2022 budget, we committed to reaching 35,000 workers by June this year. We reached that goal last December, six months ahead of schedule. The 2023-24 budget again expanded the scheme responsibly, which now provides jobs to 37,700 Pacific and Timor-Leste workers. It also signalled a significant reform to PALM.

The government will strengthen its oversight of the scheme by bringing its domestic delivery into the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations. This will better protect workers and improve their experience. It will increase the scheme's regional footprint and ensure sufficient support for small growers. For the first time, we will fund the scheme sustainably. The government will provide an additional $168.1 million over four years to insource domestic operations. We are ensuring that agencies are resourced to effectively manage the scheme's integrity as it grows. I welcome this change because it fulfils our commitment to stamping out migrant worker exploitation. We have zero tolerance for worker mistreatment. We are the Labor Party.

Participating countries will receive additional resources to boost the number of workers taking up jobs in Australia, ensuring that each country can manage a growing scheme on terms that it judges meet its developmental goals while helping Australian businesses access a pool of productive and reliable workers. This will produce a brain gain for the Pacific and Timor-Leste. I know that this is a big issue for some countries in the Pacific, including Samoa, which I visited in June and where there are concerns about PALM causing a brain drain to Australia. Additionally, the government will help over 1,000 PALM scheme workers gain formal qualifications. This measure will deliver a skills dividend across the Pacific, and that is that skills gain that I just spoke about. We will also make it easier for PALM scheme workers to access their superannuation savings when they return home. Finally, the government will provide access to Medicare for an initial 200 families who participate in a pilot. PALM is not only important for the development needs of our Pacific family; it is of clear importance to Australia's national interests as well.

I note in passing that this motion's claim that PALM was 'established by the coalition' is, of course, by no means the full story, as is often the case with those opposite. The pilot was a Rudd Labor government innovation in 2008. It continued under Prime Minister Gillard in 2012, and the coalition rebadged and reformed it in 2018 and 2021. I give them some credit for continuing it but not for creating PALM.

The scheme really matters to businesses across our country, because it fills workplace shortages in regional Australia. In the Northern Territory, which is proud to host over 1,000 PALM workers, we have seen 215 arrive from Samoa and 151 from Vanuatu to pick mangoes in recent times, and I know that at the end of last year there were a couple of hundred people from Timor-Leste in the Northern Territory as well. Thirty-five Samoans have also served as aged-care and disability support workers in remote areas of the Territory, which will be a brain gain when they return home to Samoa.

These reforms will ensure that PALM workers' stay in Australia not only benefits them personally and their families, by helping them send remittance back to their communities—which in places like Tonga is worth up to 38 per cent of their GDP, which is huge for that country and many others—but also benefits, most importantly, Australian businesses and Australian foreign relations with our Pacific family, because—let's face it—it's a more contested environment in the Pacific these days. So it's important for Pacific countries and it's important for Australia as well.

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