An Agricultural Visa and Australia’s Pacific Mess

August was not the best month for Australia’s relationships in the Pacific. The bumbling conservative government, fresh from its most recent internal schism, didn’t give the Pacific Island Forum (PIF) the respect it deserved by failing sending the prime minister to attend, and then attempted to water down the forum’s statements on climate change (the Pacific’s primary security threat). While Pacific leaders were continuing to wonder how seriously Australia takes them and their concerns, details of a proposed new agricultural labor visa started to emerge, creating further distress in Pacific capitals.

Australia currently has two visas – the Seasonal Worker Program (for agricultural labor) and the Pacific Labor Scheme (for semi-skilled workers) – exclusively available to citizens of Pacific Island countries (as well as Timor-Leste) that provide them with access to job opportunities in rural Australia. These visas are for the most part very successful. They allow employers – particularly in the agricultural sector – the ability to fill their labor shortages, and give Pacific Islanders access to financial opportunities that are unavailable in their home countries. The remittances they send home, and the skills they gain, are deemed highly advantageous to Pacific Island governments. Greater labor market access to Australia has become a major strategic goal for most Pacific Island countries.

With Australia’s cities booming, drawing people out of small towns, labor shortages in rural areas are becoming a significant problem, to the extent that even Pacific labor is insufficient to meet the labor needs. The National Farmers Federation – the organization that has been lobbying heavily for a new visa – has claimed there is a shortfall of around 100,000 farm workers throughout Australia. In the 12 months from July 2017 to July 2018, the Pacific Seasonal Workers Program granted 8,457 visas, having only a small impact on this demand. The subsequent pressure has driven the rural-based National Party, one of the coalition partners of the current government, to aggressively seek policies that will alleviate this problem. The creation of a new visa category, aimed at attracting agricultural workers from Asian countries, was established and set to be announced.

Yet this push from the Nationals failed to understand the wider foreign policy implications. Large labor shortages or not, the promotion of a new agricultural labor visa was bound to upset Pacific Island countries. For these small countries in the region the fear was that their labor opportunities would simply be overwhelmed by workers from more populous countries like Indonesia, India, and Vietnam. These countries would have greater resources to lobby industries on behalf of their citizens, and would be able develop employment networks that Pacific Island countries would not be able to compete with. Pacific leaders worried that both the Seasonal Workers Program and the Pacific Labor Scheme would first be sidelined, and then ultimately terminated in the face of such competition.

That the Australian government was set to announce a new visa category aimed at increased agricultural labor without having consulted Pacific leaders – to whom the issue is incredibly important – further added to their sense of aggrievement. It also demonstrated a lack of policy consistency across departments. It was only after media reports about the new visa category started to surface that the new minister for foreign affairs, Marise Payne, was able explain the implications of this new visa to her colleagues, and have its roll-out postponed. The fact that the new visa got almost to the point of launch without any cross-departmental coordination or consultation was an incredibly amateurish display from the government.

Payne subsequently reaffirmed that the government would ensure “Pacific countries would always take precedence” in any new visa categories designed to boost overseas farm labor, and pledged that the government maintained a strong commitment to the existing visa arrangements designed specifically for Australia’s Pacific neighbors. Despite these positive reassurances from the foreign minister, that the implications for the Pacific were ignored until the very last minute sent another poor signal from Canberra to the region. 

For all of Australia’s concern about the increased strategic competition in the region from China, the essential ability to connect its domestic requirements to its Pacific foreign policy currently seems amiss. That labor mobility for Pacific Islanders was placed at the heart of Australia’s 2017 Foreign Policy White Paper, fully recognizing that this is something that is highly desired by Pacific government and where China is unable to compete, makes this amateur policy coordination even more apparent.  While it is obvious that Pacific Island countries will be unable to meet the labor demands that Australia’s agricultural industry requires, finding a way to prioritize and protect their access to these jobs will need to become an essential approach to any revised visa categories that will emerge.