Jobs and Skills Summit: NFF calls for rural housing task force and better visas

The National Farmers’ Federation will demand these four crucial actions from government at next week’s Jobs and Skills Summit.

A national task force should be set up to investigate and steer the delivery of regional accommodation, restrictions should be lifted on pensioners wanting to do farm work and visa application times should be slashed.

These are a handful of the recommendations the National Farmers’ Federation will present to the Federal Government next week at its Jobs and Skills Summit to address the industry’s chronic worker shortage.

The peak body representing farmers across Australia is so far the only organisation to receive an invite to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Treasurer Jim Chalmers’ flagship economic summit. The two-day affair will be held at Parliament House and will see the nation’s biggest employers, industry representatives and unions talk frankly with federal and state government leaders about how to tackle Australia’s shortage of skilled and unskilled workers, current migration settings, wages and economic reform.

National Farmers’ Federation president Fiona Simson will call on the Prime Minister to fix agriculture’s worker crisis. Picture: Sarah Marshall

NFF president Fiona Simson said the summit would be an opportunity to address one of the root issues stunting Australia’s farming sector, “chronic labour shortages”.

“Even before the pandemic, farmers were reducing plantings or shifting to less labour-intensive produce,” Ms Simson said. “Recent weather has thrown curveballs at food production. Couple that with issues like the workforce crisis, and the result has been gaps on supermarket shelves … Governments can’t control the weather, but they can ease the workforce crisis.”

She said the NFF would go to the summit pushing four key messages; tailor a migration program to agriculture’s specific needs, open up worker participation to those on pensions or NDIS support, reform the vocational training sector so agriculture was less of an “afterthought” and improve the public’s perception of farm work.

The peak farming body has taken aim at the former Coalition Government for failing to implement many of the recommendations from the National Agricultural Labour Advisory Committee’s National Agricultural Workforce Strategy, which was published in December 2020.

“While the NFF did not agree with every one of the Committee’s recommendations, for the most part we found them sensible and practical. Unfortunately, many are yet to be adopted by government,” it said in a document outlining its agenda ahead of the summit.

Many of those recommendations will be reiterated by the NFF, including developing an app to promote seasonal jobs that includes information on accommodation, services and work rights and establishing an Agricultural Workforce Data Analysis Unit to collect and analyse the industry’s workforce data.

Agriculture Minister Murray Watt is looking to the Pacific Australia Mobility Visa scheme to secure workers for Australian farms. Picture: Gary Ramage

The NFF appears to have abandoned calls for an agriculture-specific visa, and has focused its efforts on improving access to the Pacific Australia Labour Mobility visa scheme.

Agriculture Minister Murray Watt reiterated his government’s commitment to fostering closer ties to the Pacific last week, including through enhanced visa settings for Pacific workers.

“The ag visa is one of those things David Littleproud talked a lot about but never delivered. It didn’t produce a single worker. We’ve decided to beef-up a system that’s proven to work (PALM) and we think there is a really big opportunity to expand and strengthen it,” Mr Watt told The Weekly Times.