AGRICULTURE — PACIFIC LABOUR SCHEME AND SEASONAL
WORKER PROGRAMME
54. Hon
COLIN TINCKNELL to the Minister for Regional Development:
I am aware that chronic labour
shortages on farms throughout Western Australia still exist. I also refer to
the government's significant funding efforts towards facilitating
agricultural training through various schemes such as Work and Wander Out
Yonder, subsidised accommodation, free skillset offerings at Muresk, TAFE
transport operator training, and funding the multicultural services Australia
training to get migrants working in the regions. How many additional workers
have been retained in the regions through these schemes, and does the
government believe that these have been successful in their approach?
Hon
ALANNAH MacTIERNAN replied:
I
thank the member for the question. However, I just want him to appreciate that
this is an issue all around Australia. The fundamental problem is that
we have a global pandemic on and we cannot bring people in. We have all
understood that that will be a challenge. The number of backpackers across Australia
has gone down from 137 000 to some 36 000. We can see that that has been a real
decline. We cannot make new people, but we can do everything we can to
encourage Western Australians to go out and do that work, and to some extent we
have been successful. We are not saying that this solves the whole problem. We
cannot do the Pol Pot thing and go down with a gun and make people go out of
the city and pick fruit. It is not going to happen.
Our
incentive scheme has managed to attract quite a few people. To date, we have
made payments for 1 152 applicants. That is a considerable amount. That
has resulted in about $1.5 million going out. I am very pleased to see that. One of the reasons that our scheme has been
successful is that it has not been very bureaucratic. People do not need to
have lots of receipts; they just have to show that they have been employed. The
commonwealth government scheme has not really worked, but it has
recently announced changes to make that more workable, and that should help.
I am proud of what we have achieved with the Seasonal Worker
Programme and the Pacific Labour Scheme. So far, in some very challenging
environments, 786 seasonal workers have come into Western Australia, and they
are doing a fantastic job in all parts of the state, from Albany all the way up
to Kununurra and over to Broome. The next flight has been approved for May,
there are two for June, and one for July. At the end of July, that will mean we
will have 1 400 workers, principally from Vanuatu and Tonga. I do not have the
precise numbers on the projects that are being run by Muresk and TAFE, and I will
get those for the member, but they have certainly had a great take-up of both
the harvest operations program using the simulator at Muresk and the heavy
vehicle driving operations skills program. We have not been able to work out
what the multicultural program is, but I can say that our goldfields migrant
scheme has really been successful. We have 69 people from basically African and
Middle Eastern backgrounds who are now working in Kalgoorlie.