Chamber of Commerce, City of Darwin representatives East Timor bound to find mango pickers

With up to 20 per cent of last year’s mango crop left to rot on the ground, desperate Territory farmers are looking overseas for workers. Read about the worker crisis here.

A special Air North charter will deliver the first high-level Territory business delegation to Timor Leste in a decade on Wednesday morning.

Led by the Chamber of Commerce NT and with senior NT government and City of Darwin representation, the two-day visit will target potential trade opportunities and worker recruitment.

Chamber of Commerce NT chief executive Greg Ireland said about 40 people from dozens of businesses and associations will travel to East Timor for a series of meetings and farm and business visits.

Business, Jobs and Training Minister Paul Kirby will represent the NT government.

The Territory’s nearest international neighbour, East Timor has a population of 1.3 million people and there is a strong history of trade and commercial involvement between Darwin and Dili.

NT Chamber of Commerce chief executive Greg Ireland

“We have partnered with NT Farmers and the Territory government and are fully supported by industry and businesses like Air North who already have strong connections in Timor Leste,” Mr Ireland said.

“It appears from the level of interest around this delegation that business is looking to take advantage of a potential worker resource opportunity but also to do business with Timor Leste across the Timor trench.

“We have done these things before but it’s probably close to a decade ago since we’ve had a concerted effort with Timor Leste at government and business level.”

The delegation will build on relationships already developed by NT Farmers, which has already secured a number of East Timorese to work on Territory farms.

NT Farmers chief executive Paul Burke

At an event to mark the opening of the 2022 mango season on Tuesday, NT Farmers chief executive Paul Burke said the sector was currently 1000 workers short of optimum.

Mr Burke said there were 13 applications filled for 317 mango industry positions advertised last week and recruitment had never been this difficult.

“Even last year it has never been this tight,” Mr Burke said.

“We need everything. Pickers, packers, forklift drivers. We’re really crucially short of truck drivers at the moment.”

Mr Burke welcomed commitments by the federal government following last week’s Jobs and Skills Summit in Canberra to fast-track visa processing.

He said the Territory agricultural sector supported other measures including enabling students to work longer hours without impacting payments and extending existing visitor visas.

“The federal government has already committed more resources into that and we need them to start today so we can begin to process visas in a speedy way,” he said.

This year’s Territory mango harvest is expected to produce 2.7 million trays, 300,000 more than last year.

Two-thousand pickers are employed each year by mango farmers and a shortage of pickers last year meant between 10 and 20 per cent of crop didn’t make it to market.

Paul Kirby commited to supporting farmers this mango season. Picture: (A)manda Parkinson

Mr Kirby said the Territory government had been working with the Commonwealth to introduce separate “bespoke” visa arrangements with neighbouring countries such as Timor Leste.

“We have more people living just to the north of us than we have to the south so capacity for us to invest in bespoke visa arrangements to countries to the north is absolutely what we’ll be talking about to the Timorese people and we’ll certainly be ramming that home to the federal government as well,” he said.

Mr Kirby said the Territory and East Timor would benefit from more flexible visas.

“It’s almost like a foreign aid proposal where workers from Timor Leste can come here if they’re well-skilled workers. There’s plenty of work in construction and farming is one with the least amount of training for people to be able to safely start,” he said.

“It’s a good program for us to run if people can move more freely between East Timor and the Northern Territory and will create more opportunities. It helps us get more fruit and vegetables out in the Northern Territory and they take that money back where they build schools, they build churches and it really does help in their local villages.”