Dorinda Cox (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This week I've had the honour of meeting with two separate delegations of young people. One was the Multicultural Youth Advocacy Network's FUSE event, which brings together diverse young people from across Australia who've shown exceptional leadership potential and a deep commitment to addressing key issues faced by our young people from refugee and migrant backgrounds. The other was the Pacific Australian Emerging Leaders Summit. In my discussions with these two groups, we covered issues that are relevant to young people but that are, in particular, impacting on people from diverse backgrounds. One of the issues raised with me that I want to speak about today is blackbirding.

Blackbirding started in the 1860s and involved Pacific islanders who were forced or tricked into working on plantations in Australia. There are unmarked graves of slaves that are still being uncovered today. The Pacific Island Labourers Act 1901 ordered the massive deportation most of the 10,000 or so labourers in this country as part of the White Australia policy. Only about 2½ thousand islanders avoided deportation, and their descendants today are known as Australia's South Sea islander community. In 1994, the Commonwealth recognised this group. Queensland did so in 2000 and New South Wales in 2013. But we all know that every year Pacific islanders and, indeed, people from many countries come to Australia for seasonal work on farms, and we've heard horror stories about some of the conditions in these workplaces. I don't think many of us realise the dark history of this, but it's something we all need to reconcile with, and we need to acknowledge the ongoing impacts of this practice, both on the South Sea islander community and on the reliance by the agricultural sector on migrant workers, who are so often exploited in horrible working conditions and often horrible pay.