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FRED Tassone is one of scores of operators of orchards, market gardens and vineyards across the country who cannot find enough workers to pick their produce.
Despite more than 460,000 people being officially unemployed in Australia, the chronic labour shortage in the horticulture industry has reached the point where fruit has been left rotting on trees, and vegetables are left in the ground.
The federal Government is evaluating a recently completed trial of a seasonal workers program in New Zealand, generally regarded as successful by government and industry alike. Soon the sight of Pacific Islanders in fields across Australia may be commonplace.
A decision on a pilot of a program allowing Pacific Islanders short-term visas of up to six months is expected in the next few weeks. Pacific leaders have long advocated the freer movement of labour.
Mr Tassone, who runs his table-grape operation Tassone’s Produce at Robinvale, near Mildura in Victoria, said farmers across the district were finding it hard to get workers.
Like thousands of other farmers, he is hopeful the Government will implement a seasonal workers program sooner rather than later.
The mining boom in Western Australia has attracted many people who might once have been prepared to do the hard physical work in the orchards and vineyards.
“It doesn’t matter whether the unemployment rate is 5 per cent or 50 per cent, Australia’s unemployed don’t want to do our work,” Mr Tassone said.
“Unskilled workers can make up to $1200 a week, but Australians just don’t want to do it.”
Jonathan Nathundriwa, 30, from Fiji, who works on a farm next to Mr Tassone’s, said local unemployed people were not interested in the hard physical work required.
On the other hand, the Islanders would be delighted to earn a decent income, Mr Nathundriwa said.
“My family back in Fiji are busting their chops for $10 a day,” he said.
“I would love to be able to give them employment.”
Gay Tripodi, who runs stone-fruit operation Murrawee Farms at Swan Hill, in Victoria, said backpackers were not a solution.
“For God’s sake, they’re a nightmare,” she said. “It’s not their fault — most are good kids, but 99 per cent have never been on a farm.
“We need workers who can stay with us for the duration of the season, five to six months.
“We can train them up and then they return to us the following year. We have been really struggling. The situation is dramatic.”
Horticulture Australia Council head Kris Newton, who would oversee a pilot seasonal workers scheme, said there had been increasing farm production, driven by increasing population. “On the other hand, you have declining sources of seasonal labour,” she said.
Average incomes on the Pacific islands are often less than $1000 ayear.
Manjula Luthria, senior regional economist with the World Bank, said large pools of unemployed youths across the Pacific were young, fit and keen to work.
She said islanders could return with savings of more than $5000, several times what they could earn in a year at home.
“In New Zealand, the seasonal worker program has built hope into island communities,” Dr Luthria said. “It has brought a real pride of labour. It’s something we as outsiders in the aid community can never build. This scheme is the shortest wayto achieve the largest amount of development.”
Australian Workers Union national secretary Paul Howse said the union supported the proposal as long as the islander workers were paid the same as Australians.
Credit: John Stapleton