But overseas workers face uncertain prospects

Nic Maclellan




Papua New Guinea and Australia have signed an agreement opening the way for PNG workers to join Australia’s seasonal worker programme.
Australian Foreign Minister Stephen Smith joined his PNG counterpart Sam Abal in Milne Bay Province on July 8, to sign a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) for PNG participation in the Pacific Seasonal Worker Pilot Scheme (PSWPS).
The signing was part of an Australia-PNG Ministerial meeting in Alotau, which saw a range of agreements on aid, trade and economic co-operation.
Speaking after the ministerial meeting, Foreign Minister Abal noted that it will still be a few months before PNG seasonal workers arrive in Australia.
“Because this is a new initiative for Papua New Guinea, we want to organise it properly,” said Abal. “This is a new thing for the young people of PNG and this government and it is important for us.”
Papua New Guinea is one of four countries participating in the Australian seasonal worker pilot, which was first announced in August 2008.
 The other countries—Kiribati, Tonga and Vanuatu—signed similar MOUs in November 2008, with the first workers arriving in Australia in February 2009. But Papua New Guinea has only finalised its MOU halfway into the pilot, which is scheduled to run until July 2012.
Under the initial pilot, up to 2,500 visas will be issued for Pacific islanders to work in orchards and plantations across Australia. Overseas workers can be employed by “Approved Employers” for up to seven months in a 12-month period, when Australian workers cannot be found to take up the jobs.
Paying half their own international airfare and other administration costs, Pacific seasonal workers are guaranteed an average 30 hours work a week over a six-month period.
The pilot is limited to the horticulture sector, with workers picking fruit, harvesting nuts, pruning vines and fruit trees or working in packing sheds for the export of almonds, citrus fruit, table grapes and other crops.
Workers must return home at the end of their contract, but can apply again for another visa.
This “circular temporary migration” is designed to help employers cut the cost of retraining each new casual worker at peak harvest times, while increasing remittances that will benefit rural villagers.
As reported in ISLANDS BUSINESS last January, the pilot has been slow getting off the ground. At the end of July 2010, only 123 visas have been issued during the pilot.
In the first phase of the scheme, from August 2008 until 30 June 2009, only 56 visas were issued for 50 workers from Tonga and six from Vanuatu.
A year on, the numbers are still small. In 2009-10, just 67 new visas were issued, with 21 of these for Tongan workers who have returned for a second year.
At the end of July 2010, 11 i-Kiribati and 21 Tongans are working at Robinvale in Victoria, with a further 36 Tongans at Mundubbera in Queensland. More Pacific workers are scheduled to arrive this month, but the signing of the PNG-Australia MOU opens the way for the largest Forum island country to begin recruitment.

PNG joins the scheme
After PNG’s cabinet decided to participate in the scheme in May 2009, it created a PNG Seasonal Worker Taskforce to co-ordinate selection, screening and administration.
For months, PNG and Australian officials have been discussing how recruitment will operate in an island nation with a population and land area much larger than New Zealand.
The World Bank sent a facilitation mission to Papua New Guinea last May, to assess PNG’s labour export capacity and systems for processing and administration.
In spite of this preparation, there’s still a way to go before PNG workers arrive in Australian orchards and plantations. PNG involvement couldn’t formally begin until the signing of the MOU last month and the PNG taskforce has now prepared a budget to go to government for all aspects of the programme.
In July, Abal announced plans to establish offices in Port Moresby and Sydney to co-ordinate both ends of the operation.
PNG officials are worried that they have little time to get their end up and running before the Australian government makes a decision on the future of the seasonal worker programme.
Australian officials are scheduled to submit a final evaluation of the pilot to government in August 2011, assessing both impacts on the domestic industry and development outcomes for Pacific households and communities.
This evaluation will be used by cabinet in its decision to continue, expand or end the programme, after the pilot ends in 2012.
Expectations are high, as other Pacific Islands Forum  countries and neighbours like Timor-Leste hope to send unskilled workers to Australia.
Opportunities for skilled workers are also on the regional agenda as countries debate whether to include labour mobility in agreements like PACER-Plus or the Australia-China Free Trade Agreement.
There are also significant labour needs for the booming PNG LNG industry and the planned relocation of thousands of US Marines from Okinawa to Guam.
In spite of the MOU signing, there is ongoing debate about labour mobility in Papua New Guinea.
PNG Education Minister James Marape told a recent Australia Pacific Technical College graduation ceremony: “We should focus on sending our skilled human resources to foreign countries to improve the lives of the people, not just sending fruit pickers and labourers to work in farms and plantations in Australia.”
Some leaders talk of temporary work opportunities for tourism, aged care, construction and other industries.
But as a pilot study in just one industry, the current tally of 123 visas for Australia’s PSWPS is causing concern in sending countries.
In contrast, New Zealand’s Regional Seasonal Employer (RSE) scheme has shown greater outcomes since it began in April 2007.
Nearly 4,000 RSE visas were issued in the first year of the New Zealand scheme and another 7,158 RSE workers came to New Zealand between April 2008 and March 2009 (78 percent from the Pacific and the rest from South East Asia).
There were 5,500 RSE workers working in New Zealand on 31 March 2009, working for 138 RSE employers. Given the international recession, numbers in New Zealand have dipped over the last year, with about 6,000 RSE workers arriving and working for shorter periods in 2009-10.
Australian officials and growers are quick to stress the differences between the horticulture sectors in the two countries, due to geography, divisions between national and state governments and industry cost structures. For example, transporting workers from Sydney to rural Queensland is much more expensive than moving from Auckland to fruit growing areas in New Zealand).
However, New Zealand maintains a cap of 8,000 RSE visas a year, in contrast to Australia’s total of 2,500 visas over three years.
With participation so low under PSWPS, the Australian government organised a major conference on the seasonal worker pilot in Sydney from 14-16 July. Australian officials from the Departments of Immigration, Employment and Workplace Relations, Foreign Affairs and AusAID were joined by Approved Employers, growers, local government, labour researchers and community leaders, as well as officials from the four Pacific countries in the scheme.
This was the second in a series of three meetings during the pilot, which shared information on the outcomes so far and debated ways of increasing the number of growers who might employ Pacific workers.

Australian commitment
Speaking at the opening of the conference, former Parliamentary Secretary for Pacific Islands Affairs Duncan Kerr stressed that in spite of the “disappointing” number of visas issued so far, “we want to reinforce that the Australian government is committed to the pilot, although the pilot cannot be the panacea for the range of social and economic challenges in the region.”
At a time of debates on immigration, racism and border protection, Kerr noted: “Sometimes it has been frustrating that it took so much work to set up a fail-safe system, but we’ve tried to make the scheme as robust as possible.”
The Australian government has already changed the details of the scheme since it was first announced in 2008, allowing more growers across the country to recruit workers, instead of just two sites in Victoria and New South Wales.
The number of Approved Employers has expanded to seven, with these labour hire companies responsible for selection, administration and transport, then working with growers to find places for overseas workers in jobs that cannot be filled by Australians.
In spite of this, delegates to last month’s conference argued that the feeble tally of visas suggests that more growers need to be enticed to try out the scheme.
One of the Approved Employers in the pilot, Paul Kiley of All Recruiting Services (ARS), believes government needs to tweak the regulations again to encourage more growers to participate.
Speaking to ISLANDS BUSINESS, Kiley said: “The current taxation system for overseas workers requires them to be in Australia for six months to gain a lower tax rate. Can there be any changes to this tax regime?
May be the government could also change visa requirements to allow people to come for shorter periods of time rather than one block of six months.”
In the last two years of global economic recession, Australia’s horticulture sector has benefitted from a ready supply of labour from working holiday-makers, overseas students and backpackers.
Pacific workers under PSWPS also face competition from the large number of “unauthorised” workers in the industry: overstayers, people working in breach of their tourist visa or workers paid under-award wages or cash in hand by dodgy contractors.
While lobby groups like the National Farmers Federation (NFF) have long campaigned for the use of overseas temporary workers, so far they have failed to persuade their members to participate in the Pacific pilot.
With tight margins for exports, some growers are seeking to shift extra costs (such as the full amount of overseas or domestic transport) onto Pacific workers.
This raises union and community concerns about potential exploitation of temporary workers, with fear that some employers in a largely non-unionised industry are simply seeking a source of cheap labour.
Following an interim evaluation of the pilot by TNS Research, Australian officials have been discussing possible changes to the scheme, to encourage more growers to participate.
But Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s announcement of an election for 21 August has complicated the process.
The Australian government goes into caretaker mode and cannot make significant policy changes until after the elections.
In the past, the opposition Coalition parties led by Liberal leader Tony Abbott has criticised the use of Pacific seasonal workers, so the future of labour policy will be greatly affected by the election outcome.
In a campaign with both major parties acting tough on immigration and asylum seekers, overseas workers face uncertain prospects.