Business calls for refugees to work on farms

Refugees placed in indefinite ­detention in Melbourne’s Park Hotel and other centres would be sent to farms to harvest produce, under a plan to ease chronic staff shortages.

Protesters outside the Park Hotel in Melbourne’s Carlton. Picture: Andrew Henshaw

Refugees placed in indefinite ­detention in Melbourne’s Park Hotel and other centres would be sent to the paddocks, harvesting lettuces, tomatoes and other fresh produce, under a plan to ease the chronic staff shortages plaguing the nation’s food supply chain.

David Williams – the corporate adviser behind some of the biggest deals across the food and beverage sectors, including returning Vegemite back to Australian ownership – is pushing for asylum-seekers to be released from hotel detention and be “given a life” to help Covid-fuelled food and grocery shortages.

The plight of refugees, holed up for years in $109-a-night room hotels, was highlighted during Novak Djokovic’s visa stoush with the federal government when he was forced to stay in Carlton’s Park Hotel, enduring it’s reportedly “maggoty food”.

But Mr Williams said as labour shortages reached as high as 50 per cent across the food supply chain, fuelling restaurant closures and grocery shortages at supermarket chains, the refugees would be better placed on farms than in dank hotels to help keep the economy moving.

“Many farmers are in desperate need of labour to get product off (the farm) and all options need to be urgently considered,’’ he said.

Australian Food and Grocery Council (AFGC) chairman Darren O’Brien, who is also the Asia ­Pacific president of Cadbury maker Mondelez, said he was open to the plan to release refugees.

“I’m very happy to have discussions with the AFGC and with its members to see whether there is a program, which we could help to sponsor or be involved in where we could put people into some of the active agricultural work,” Mr O’Brien said.

“Whether it was providing an income or providing a different program that actually gave them sort of meaningful engaged work both from a mental health and overall perspective that provides a contribution and alleviates ­potentially some of the big ­(labour) shortages we’re seeing because we still don’t really have an open market for foreign ­students or backpackers or others who were fulfilling a large part of this casual work in the agricultural sector.

“I’m making an assumption that the majority of these people aren’t considered to pose a security threat, so that the arrangements … could be relatively simple.”

Another measures proposed to alleviate the supply chain problem included pushing for the isolation period for people deemed close contacts of Covid-19 cases to be cut from seven to five days.

“Nobody’s proposing that anybody who has obviously tested positive would return to work,” Mr O’Brien said, adding that businesses rather than governments needed to take a greater role in managing the pandemic.

National Retail Association director Dominique Lamb agreed, and said as many people as possible needed to be returned to the workforce.

“At the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, we said that our membership at the time in the month of March lost over $1bn. And now a lot are saying that this is worse than when we started, worse than the lockdown because there is no end day,” she said.

Independent Food Distributors Australia chief executive Richard Forbes warned many small businesses would struggle to survive without access to labour. “The hospitality sector involves food distributors and suppliers and they are losing up to 50 per cent of their revenue because the hospitality is ­effectively being locked down across the country,” he said.