Goulburn Valley fruit harvest downgraded due to picker shortage

A shortage of pickers in the Goulburn Valley means fruit is maturing faster than it can be harvested, leading to losses as fruit is downgraded and dumped on the second-grade wholesale market.

Growers say picking pears is thirsty work that most unemployed Australians don’t want to do, even with a government bonus.

VICTORIA’S picker shortage means thousands of tonnes of over-mature pears and apples will be downgraded across the Goulburn Valley this season.

Mooroopna orchardist Peter Hall said the downgrades would cost growers dearly and took aim at Premier Daniel Andrews’ delayed and chaotic response to the problem, after a last minute deal to offer unemployed Australians a $2430 seasonal harvest sign-on bonus.

“Culturally Australians for decades have shown little interest in this type of work,” Mr Hall said. “It just reveals the lack of understanding by the government.”

He said growers were reporting they had just two-thirds of the labour they needed, which meant fruit was maturing faster than pickers could strip it from trees.

“A greater percentage of the bins will be over-mature, and this second-grade fruit will flood the second-grade wholesale market,” Mr Hall said.

He said second-grade plums had already swamped the market and now pear growers were suffering a similar fate as they struggled to get fruit off before it became too mature.

What’s most frustrating for Mr Hall is that as a member of the Goulburn Valley Regional Partnership group advising government his and other growers’ calls for action last year were ignored.

“All these decisions are too late,” he said. “Pear growers’ season finishes in March and apples will be done by April-May.”

The Victorian Government was also late to the party in signing off on a deal to recruit 1500 Pacific Islander workers, who have been quarantined in Tasmania at a cost of $7.8m, with growers told they would have to contribute $2000 per worker.

Those workers are not expected to arrive in Victoria until March, while other states such as Queensland started bringing Pacific Island workers in under an agreement with the Federal Government last November.

Mr Hall said growers struggled to see the value this late in the season of paying $2000 to get Pacific Island workers from Tasmania.

“It’s just chaotic from an orchardist’s perspective, this piecemeal approach,” Mr Hall said.

He said growers had also been upset by Premier Andrews’ comments blaming orchardists for the inability to recruit pickers.

Last December Mr Andrews told Parliament: “this is an industry where workers are not highly paid”.

“This is an industry where I think it simply cannot be avoided pointing out the fact that we have seen many, many examples of not the highest standards of practice when it comes to health and safety, industrial relations, the protection of workers and the proper pay for a proper day’s work.”