Vikki Campion: Let’s put the partying backpackers to work

Australia is hurtling toward a farm labour workforce crisis so instead of deporting the partying backpackers, we should be sending them off to work, Vikki Campion writes.

Deport criminals and deport terrorist risks, sure.

But spare the Bronte backpackers who attended a massive party on the beach while most of Sydney is in lockdown who did something wrong and really stupid but they are hardly members of the Kelly Gang.

I’ve got better idea for them. Let’s make sure they stay here so we can put them to work.

About 1.5 million Australians, or about 10 per cent of people of working age, received JobSeeker and the unemployed Youth Allowance in September.

However, Queensland, Victoria and NSW are hurtling toward a farm labour workforce crisis as we head in to peak season with no backpackers and some Centrelink recipients who think they are above picking fruit.

Our farmers are screaming out for backpackers but the new Immigration Minister Alex Hawke, NSW Police and facial recognition technology, spurred by Liberal MP’s in lockdown are set on getting rid of the ones we do have.

As the harvest season approaches the farm workforce is about 100,000 backpackers shy. About 80 per cent of them have already left and the rest are only heading one way — and that’s home.

If this trend continues, we are looking at just 20,000 backpackers remaining in Australia by November.

Unless we see a Centrelink policy epiphany or our international borders re-open we will have farmers revolting as their crops rot.

A crowd of mostly backpackers held an impromptu party at Bronte Beach on Christmas Day, sparking outrage. Picture: Toby Zerna

Instead of Minister Hawke sending Sydney’s partying backpackers out of the country — he should be sending them to work.

They can start in Orange in the Central West for next month’s apple season. Rather than the nation berating backpackers, we must acknowledge they are seeking the jobs that Jobseekers won’t seek. Without backpackers working on farms, we’d be hungry, naked and sober. Before any major decision by a federal minister, the question should be asked, how will this affect regional Australia? This is supposed to be done in Cabinet anyway but is usually treated as a bureaucratic box ticking exercise. The answer to this question is, very badly.

Across the nation, our summer harvest was a month of heartbreak. Blueberries rotted on the vine, pumpkins in the paddock and vegetables never made it to market. This year will be worse and fresh Aussie-made produce prices will rise.

We have one million people unemployed, yet Australia relies on backpackers and seasonal labour to get the fruit off the tree to feed 25 million Australians and 60 million people overseas. On the other hand, there are international pilots working in wool sheds who are not too proud to take a job. Many people have repurposed themselves from working in the city to working on farms to pay their bills during COVID-19. Pilots went from flying planes to driving harvesters. Baristas went to pick blueberries.

Centrelink sent nine Australians out to a Central NSW orchard at 7am and by 9am, eight had told the farmer that grading cherries was too hard.

He thought the last bloke was a goer until he found him asleep.

Farmers need workers to help pick their crops. Picture: Luis Enrique Ascui

Grading cherries is not humping 80kg spider-infested bunches of bananas on your shoulder or shearing sheep in 40 degree heat — it is tedious but not backbreaking.

Overseas workers make up one third of the horticulture work force, and this year they are missing. Meat processing plants, despite often operating in areas of high unemployment, do not operate at full capacity due to these same workforce shortages.

The jobs are there. The child-free, able and unemployed are there, often in the same areas, but some Australian’s simply believe they are above the work.

The Federal Government’s $6000 relocation grants to encourage harvest workers to move to the regions have had “very limited” pick up while Queensland’s $1500 relocation grants have similarly flopped.

Just as we have apples from China via New Zealand in our grocery aisles, without changes to labour settings we will become more reliant on other nations to feed us as well as supplying everything else we use.

On the final week of parliament in 2020, the Standing Committee on Agriculture and Water Resources tabled recommendations for a ”dedicated visa for migrants travelling to Australia to be employed in the agriculture sector in low-skilled occupations”.

It would allow them to stay for at least a year or to regularly return to Australia on a seasonal basis.

For this to work, Pacific Island workers must be guaranteed their numbers into Australia because of the battle of strategic influence China is engaged in.

This was promised to industry two years ago but nothing has been done — we must change the focus to bringing farm labour in rather than kicking them out.

If they don’t get this right — and urgently — the Bronte backpackers will be back in Berlin and your fruit and veg will be rotting away.