TasFarmers Matters - Easy target gets it all wrong

Few recent issues have attracted so much attention as immigration. 

The Australian political landscape is riven with discontent around high levels of permanent immigration, driving debate around issues as diverse as housing shortages and metropolitan youth crime. 

They are easy targets for those seeking to gain a political advantage – cut immigration and problem solved? Yeah, nah ...

The easiest policy solution is to hit things with very large policy hammers. The unintended consequence is that when hitting the target, you also hit non-intended targets. Sometimes the target is the big picture number, which hides the smaller picture consequences.

Which is exactly the scenario the Federal Government has created. 

To paraphrase Hanlon’s Razor, “never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity or ignorance”. 

The Federal Government announcement of a drop in the big-picture migration number completely ignored the serious impact such a decision has made on agriculture.

To reduce the overall immigration number, the Federal Government jammed the brakes on what they mistakenly thought was an easy target, referred to in agriculture as backpackers. 

Backpacker labour drives regional agriculture at times of peak demand, where the need for short-term labour is critical to getting crops in the ground, crops out of the ground, calving completed, tractors driven and sheep mustered – to name but a few jobs.

In the government’s rush to lower the headline migration figure, the government has argued that stronger control is necessary because of housing shortages and infrastructure pressures. 

In their ignorance, they have failed to recognise the critical nature of the Working Holiday Maker, or backpacker, program. And the minor detail that the backpacker program has zero negative impact on housing or infrastructure.

By proposing a ballot for people seeking second and third-year visas, the Federal Government has effectively limited extensions to around 45,000 second-year and 5000 third-year places annually.

Given the huge reliance on this sector for short-term skilled and semi-skilled labour, this number is massively inadequate and places an already struggling agriculture sector under further strain.

This federal government’s ignorance of regional and rural Australia’s resourcing needs is hard to understand. 

The agriculture portfolio sits in Federal Cabinet, and this broader immigration policy was thrashed through Cabinet over a much-publicised period of time. 

Cabinet must have been acutely aware of the consequences, farmers would expect, because the Agriculture Minister would surely have represented agriculture inside Cabinet by opposing any changes to the critical backpacker scheme.

Either way, agriculture has again been disadvantaged by ignorance. We have either been ignored, or there was an ignorance of the issue’s importance at the highest level. 

Both are unacceptable.

TasFarmers, and other bodies such as ours around the country, have argued that restricting backpackers will create labour shortages where regional employers already struggle to recruit Australians. 

Following industry pressure from the National Farmers Federation and others, the government has agreed to fast-track backpacker applications where farmers demonstrate an urgent workforce need. But farmers shouldn’t have been in this position to start with.

Reducing temporary migration and the Working Holiday Maker program will not ease population and housing pressures. These poorly-targeted restrictions will only disproportionately damage the regional agricultural industries dependent on flexible seasonal labour.

If the government genuinely wanted to solve some real problems, creating an agricultural visa that allows skilled and semi-skilled workers efficient and timely access for short-term entry would be an excellent place to start.