Dan Andrews championing Australian Open comes at cost of farmers

How can the Victorian Government pull out all the stops for a two-week sporting event, but can’t find a way to help a multi-billion industry vital to food security? asks Natalie Kotsios.

Farmers are working with a fraction of their usual harvest workers due to COVID-19 travel restrictions. Picture: Lyndon Mechielsen

PEACHES, mulched to pulp; zucchinis, ploughed into the dirt; a year’s worth of hard work from Victorian farmers come to naught and perfectly good food laid to waste because no one was there to pick or pack it.

Meanwhile in Melbourne, international tennis stars and their entourage in hard lockdown are battling their own injustices: average meals, poky hotel rooms, and even – heaven forbid – having to wash their own hair.

It’s laughable, isn’t it? Or it would be, if the reality for some farmers contending with worker shortages wasn’t so heartbreaking. 

Premier Dan Andrews has continued to defend the decision to move heaven and earth to host the Australian Open, allowing and finding room in quarantine for 1200 tennis players and staff – yet somehow still can’t finalise quarantine arrangements to bring in Pacific Island seasonal workers.

Mr Andrews argues the state risks losing the premier tennis event if it is cancelled, and with it the $387 million boost it gives to the Victorian economy.

If that’s the case, I can think of many reasons why the same priority should be given to horticulture producers desperately trying to bring in overseas workers – $8.5 billion of them, to be precise.

Agriculture Victoria first flagged back in October that it hoped to re-open the seasonal worker scheme by December 1.

That date has come and gone and all we have heard are constantly changing excuses of why the work has not been done: from negotiating arrangements, to waiting for the outcome of the hotel quarantine inquiry, to pointing the finger back at the Federal Government for not finalising its COVID-19 risk analysis of Pacific Island nations.

Industry is frustrated and at a loss to explain the delays: some believe Mr Andrews is under pressure from unions not to bring in overseas workers when Aussies are unemployed (though evidence shows there’s little interest in farm jobs), while others say the Government simply doesn’t know or doesn’t care what’s going on.

The Victorian Farmers Federation, AusVeg and the Australian Fresh Produce Alliance have presented a myriad of options to get the workers here, from on-farm quarantine to creating purpose-built regional quarantine facilities – yet the Government’s only response has been an unworkable, $8000-per-worker proposal that farmers couldn’t afford.

Victorian Agriculture Minister Mary Anne Thomas has now indicated the state is waiting for the Commonwealth’s risk assessment in the hope the Pacific Islands will be declared a “green zone” and clear the way for a quarantine-free travel bubble.

It seems bizarre that, for a Government so burnt by a COVID outbreak that swept out of control, no quarantine could end up being the solution – but whatever the outcome, a decision needs to be made soon. 

Farmers may be used to the harsh vagaries of agriculture, their fortunes made and broken at the whim of the weather – but it’s an entirely different story to lose your crop to something that could have been prevented.

• Natalie Kotsios is The Weekly Times National Affairs reporter