UK-Australia free-trade agreement: Ag-specific visa the real winner

The biggest win for farmers from the UK- Australia free trade agreement isn’t all about exports, writes Ed Gannon.

Australian farmers have plenty to be thankful for from the UK- Australia free-trade agreement.

The new free-trade agreement with the United Kingdom is good news for Australian farmers.

But it is not going to fill the China-sized hole we have in many of our major agricultural commodities.

The UK-Australia FTA is not to be sneezed at. The UK is the world’s fifth biggest economy, with a population of 66 million.

Beef, lamb, sugar, dairy and rice are the winners, with import tariffs wound down over the next decade, and tariff-free amounts allowed into the UK rising over that time.

But there does need to be some perspective.

The tariff-free quota for beef exported from Australia into the UK will rise from 35,000 tonnes to 110,000 tonnes over the next two years, when tariffs will be eliminated.

However, Australia exported 196,000 tonnes of beef to China last year. In 2019 it was 300,000 tonnes.

It will take 10 years before we can even think of filling one year of Chinese loss.

It is the same with dairy. Australia will be able to export 48,000 tonnes of the UK within five years tariff-free. Our dairy exports to China last year were 250,000 tonnes. Thankfully dairy has so far largely escaped recrimination from China in the recent trade stoush, but this illustrates the contrast in markets.

And then there is barley, one of the hardest hit by China bans, yet grain farmers get little if anything from the UK deal.

But the real action on this trade deal is the political wheeling and dealing in Canberra that has allowed the Australian Government to agree to UK backpackers coming to Australia without the current requirement that they must complete 88 days of farm work to get a 12-month extension on their stay.

This goes to the heart of the Covid-induced labour shortage in agriculture, where the normal 140,000 backpackers in Australia have been reduced to about 40,000.

It has now emerged the Nationals allowed this concession to win a long-promised ag-specific visa – which the Liberals have long opposed.

This new visa will extend not just to UK citizens who want to do farm work here, but 10 Asian countries – from where we get a lot of our seasonal labour. This includes Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand.

It will work in a similar way to the Pacific Island seasonal worker program, where a farmer sponsors a worker for a specific period and guaranteed wages and conditions.

It will hopefully provide a guaranteed and stable work force and also kill-off the underground illegal worker racket where rogue labour-hire companies – and some unscrupulous farmers – prey on vulnerable migrant workers.

In the past 18 months the fragility of Australia’s agriculture industry has been laid bare – you can have all the markets you want but if the cows can’t get milked or the fruit picked, then it is meaningless.

So the biggest impact of the ideal might not be what heads from our ports in shipping containers, but what arrives here in economy-class airplane seats.