Our ‘Pacific family’. Heroes, guests, workers or a precariat?

ABSTRACT

Australia launched a Seasonal Worker Programme (SWP) in 2012, shortly after a similar scheme in New Zealand, to bring seasonal workers from Pacific Island Countries (PICS) to work in agriculture. The scheme was seen as a potential ‘Triple Win' with sending and receiving countries, and workers' households, benefiting. Workers’ remittances contributed to welfare, especially housing and education, and small business establishment, but there were social costs associated with repeated absences. In 2018, Australia introduced the Pacific Labour Scheme (PLS) to extend guestwork opportunities into other areas of non-seasonal labour shortage such as aged care, tourism and meat processing. The shortage of local labour during COVID-19 demonstrated that Pacific guestworkers were invaluable to Australia, and in 2022 the schemes were revamped and expanded further as the PALM (Pacific Australia Labour Mobility) Scheme. Concern over a Chinese threat in the region gave further support for the expansion. PICs expressed concerns about exploitative practices, while higher rates of participation increased the potential for an incipient brain drain from the PICs, with wages roughly four times those at home, as migrants now left non-agricultural jobs. The expanded scheme continues to favour Australian employers leaving questions over, equity, uneven development and the future of the PICs.

KEYWORDS:

• Guestworkers
• labour mobility
• Pacific
• employment
• agriculture
• migration

In early 2022, as floodwaters caused havoc in northern New South Wales, a group of Fijian migrant workers made national headlines when they rescued dozens of elderly residents trapped inside a Lismore aged care home. The Fijians, who were employed at an abattoir through Australia’s Pacific Labour Scheme (PLS), were pictured wading through knee high water as they carried the elderly residents to safety, and were subsequently hailed as ‘heroes’ who, the Daily Mail proclaimed, should be ‘granted citizenship for their bravery’ (McPhee 2022). Two years earlier Papua New Guinean migrant workers had been similarly lauded for their substantial part in holding hoses in the face of the Black Summer bushfires. Heroes they might all have been, but such congratulatory media coverage hid a somewhat grimmer picture of the issues many Pacific Islander workers can face during their time in Australia.

Just a few weeks before the Fijians were being praised, at an Australian Government Inquiry into Job Security, workers from Vanuatu and Samoa testified about living and working conditions so bad that one Samoan worker claimed ‘It would have been better to just stay home’. Solicitor and advocate, Dana Levitt, observed ‘Nothing in these [workers’] contracts would stand up as legal in Australia … The whole scheme is rife with abuse and no one is doing anything about it’ (Bannister 2022). Such testimonies are in stark contrast to the discourses and rationales of positive economic benefits and development outcomes on which Australia’s Pacific labour mobility schemes were founded. Here we consider the first ten years of these schemes, ponder what the future might hold for Pacific-Australia migration streams, reflect on the wider relationship between Australia and the Pacific, and consider the role regional geopolitics and agricultural labour shortages have played in Australia’s adoption and expansion of Pacific guestworker schemes. We ask therefore for whom and why these schemes were designed, and who they benefit, which raises pointed questions about equity, exploitation and economics, and the extent to which migrant workers have become an insecure precariat.

Contemporary Pacific guestworkers: the first decade

Officially launched in 2012, and modelled on similar schemes in New Zealand and Canada, the Seasonal Worker Programme (SWP) was adopted against a backdrop of growing concern over Australia’s lack of agricultural labour and a need for closer ties with the Pacific Island Countries (PICs) (Petrou and Connell 2022). The SWP was thus hailed by Australian politicians as a means of building stronger links with what was sometimes patronisingly referred to as ‘our Pacific family’. Likewise, the SWP was seen as also delivering aid – largely through remittances – to those most in need. It was Australian farmers, however, who had argued most strongly for the scheme as the domestic supply of agricultural workers dwindled. To some observers it seemed a throwback to the ‘blackbirding’ era of the late nineteenth century when Pacific Islanders were brought, especially from the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu), sometimes willingly and sometimes under coercion, to work in the sugar plantations of Queensland. However, the new focus on remittances reflected the rise of broader neoliberal ideologies where remittances, directly received and utilised by ‘needy’ households, were perceived as far more effective at achieving positive development outcomes than traditional methods of aid delivery that failed to trickle down: the virtues of remittances became a popular ‘development mantra’ (Kapur 2004). Using this economic rationale, the SWP, like other guestworker schemes globally, was promoted as a ‘Triple Win’; workers could gain income and skills; their households and communities could benefit from economic and social remittances; and employers could secure a reliable and willing workforce. However, despite these supposedly evenly spread ‘wins’, Australian employers – and by extension the economy – gained the most significant economic benefits from the scheme; approximately A$184 million reached Pacific home communities through guestwork between 2018 and 2022, whereas employers earned roughly A$289 million in profits over the same period (Shilito 2022). Likewise the value of crops harvested during the COVID-19 pandemic was considerably greater than the wages, let alone the remittances, of Pacific guestworkers (Petrou and Connell 2022). Importantly, such economically centred discourses, often omitted the existence of broader social impacts – both positive and negative – associated with guestwork that existed alongside the economic ‘wins’.

SWP employment was initially restricted to accommodation and agriculture in regional areas, with contracts lasting for 6–9 months in a 12-month period. Horticultural employment has dominated, and while the scheme is open to nine PICs (Fiji, Kiribati, Nauru, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga, Tuvalu, Vanuatu) and Timor-Leste, just two PICs, Vanuatu and Tonga have accounted for roughly three quarters (76 per cent) of visas granted between 2012/13 and 2020/21. Other countries, such as Kiribati and Tuvalu, more remote and without good contacts in Australia, despite being relatively poor and most at risk from climate change, have barely participated. Due to employer preferences, the physical nature of horticultural employment and cultural norms at home, women have been only a minority of participants (World Bank 2018), accounting for only 17 per cent of all workers between 2012/13 and 2020/21.

In 2018, Australia expanded its temporary migration programs with the introduction of the Pacific Labour Scheme (PLS), focused on filling longer-term non-seasonal employment needs in semi-skilled industries including hospitality, tourism, aquaculture, labour hire, meat processing and aged care. PLS contracts lasted for up to three years, and were marketed by Australia’s then Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, as a ‘new chapter in relations with our Pacific family’ (DFAT 2019), and formed an integral part of the government’s Pacific Step-Up aimed at cultivating stronger ties with the PICs – ties that were considered increasingly important as the perceived threat of China in the Pacific loomed ever larger. Once again the PLS was largely driven by Australian needs for workers. Due to the inclusion of ‘female friendly’ industries, notably aged care, tourism and hospitality, the PLS was also intended to enable increased women’s participation. This certainly looked possible in its early days, with women accounting for 48 per cent of PLS participants by 2018. However, largely due to seasonal horticultural labour shortages driven by the COVID-19 pandemic and associated mobility restrictions, labour hire (agricultural) and meatworks employment soon accounted for the greatest number of workers, and by 2021 women’s participation had plummeted to 20 per cent. Still at least one i-Kiribati woman was employed skinning kangaroos in western Queensland, a skill with limited transferability home.

Despite the connections that many migrant workers formed with their host communities, the constant annual demand and the preference of many workers (who often returned season after season to the same employer) to stay on longer, neither scheme offered any options for permanent migration. The only exception was for PLS workers employed in meatworks where, due to extreme labour shortages, employers could follow a convoluted process to apply for permanent visas on behalf of their workers (Howes and Curtain 2022). While the workers might have formed part of ‘our Pacific family’, visa conditions implied that they were the type of family who was only welcome to visit sometimes, when it suited Australia, and, even then, only for clearly defined periods. With multiple PICs to choose from, and only limited guestworker places available, the power to dictate the terms of the scheme remained firmly in Australia’s hands.

Guestwork through the COVID-19 pandemic

After a slow start, the SWP soon provided a seemingly limitless flow of faceless foreign fruit pickers to Australia. Yet beyond the odd media exposé of harsh working conditions or feel-good stories about Pacific seasonal workers singing in local church choirs, buying out op-shops or reinvigorating rural football teams, most Australians gave little thought to the labour performed by these largely anonymous workers. After all, most were in quite remote areas. This all changed when the COVID-19 pandemic hit in early 2020, and international borders in Australia and the PICs slammed shut. Australia became a virtual fortress, and what had once seemed an endless labour supply from the Pacific was halted. ‘Essential workers’, including those employed by the SWP and PLS, were suddenly at the forefront of the nation’s imagination as supermarket shelves stood eerily empty. The general public were now very interested in who was picking their fruit (and performing other essential labour) and what would happen if and when this labour force was not renewed. Although Pacific workers accounted for a small proportion of the horticultural seasonal workforce prior to the pandemic, as Working Holiday Makers (WHMs or ‘backpackers’), who had performed the bulk of this labour, returned home to countries where COVID was raging, and new ones failed to arrive, it quickly became clear that Australia’s seasonal labour needs could not be met locally – even with incentives such as elusive relocation allowances and questionable promises from then Deputy Prime Minister Michael McCormack that fruit picking would provide a ‘great Instagram moment’, most Australians remained uninterested (Stead and Petrou 2022a). Attention thus turned to temporary labour migrants from the PICs, some of the few nations that were still largely COVID free in 2020: quite suddenly, it became very clear just how reliant Australia had become on temporary migrant workers.

The plight of farmers seeking to get labour – and thus of potential food supply and its cost – became regular news items. More significantly, as a crack appeared in the rigid border, Australia’s COVID vaccination rates increased and the worst of the pandemic seemed over, the very first flights into Australia were charter flights from Vanuatu in August 2020. The first brought one hundred and sixty-odd nervous seasonal workers from COVID-19-free Vanuatu to the mango plantations of the Northern Territory. Once again farmers had called the shots and made the greatest economic gains. While the labour mobility schemes are generally portrayed as Australia ‘helping’ the Pacific, COVID-19 neatly demonstrated how the SWP was also a ‘reverse aid’ project for Australian employers.

As Pacific migrant workers became increasingly visible, so too did many of the issues that had long plagued the SWP. When the scheme was first introduced, such problems as poor or unsuitable accommodation, social isolation, racism, difficulties in accessing medical insurance and health care, fluctuating work hours and a cultural disinclination to complain about poor conditions, including wage theft, all became evident (Petrou and Connell 2018, 2022; Stead 2019). Not all employers and labour contractors were fair, and recourse to solutions was difficult. Over time, what initially seemed to be teething problems, that would quickly be resolved, remained evident and seemingly endemic – if impossible to quantify – just as they did in New Zealand’s parallel scheme, in other global guestworker schemes (Petrou and Connell 2022) and in Australian WHM schemes (Wang and Connell 2021; Oishi 2022). Indeed, WHMs, seeking to gain visa extensions by working for three months in rural and regional areas, had adopted the popular Instagram hashtag ‘88 days a slave’.

These longstanding problems gained new saliency as the COVID-19 pandemic hit and mobility restrictions meant workers were unable to return home as planned. For many workers this intensified existing issues with the scheme as work contracts stretched on, horticultural seasons ended, working hours decreased out of season, but living costs did not, and social distancing meant that mixing with supportive local communities was often now impossible (Petrou et al. 2021). Many workers simply missed their families, to whom they should have returned, and were surprised and shocked by Australian winters. At the same time ‘problems’, such as worsened mental health, unexpected pregnancy, misbehaviour and even crime, once dealt with by simply sending errant workers home, began to grow (Bailey and Bedford 2022). The pandemic drew national attention to the fact that all was not well on the migrant labour front.

As the pandemic continued, SWP workers were faced with a dilemma: some wanted to return home, and did so as soon as repatriation flights were offered. As formerly tourism-reliant Pacific economies now struggled, and workers were unsure of when borders would reopen, some chose to remain in Australia and work a longer season to support family at home. Most were simply stuck. Despite reduced earnings early in the pandemic, many workers chose to sacrifice their own consumption to maintain remittance levels (World Bank 2021). Nonetheless, separation from family and worry about contracting COVID or carrying it back to the Pacific loomed large in workers’ minds (Stead and Petrou 2022b). While the Australian government introduced various payments to help citizens deal with fluctuating work hours, the same concern was not applied to migrant workers who relied largely on the goodwill of diaspora and local communities (Petrou et al. 2021). The issues inherent in outsourcing worker welfare and social reproduction to home countries reverberated throughout the scheme and impacted not only workers, but local communities who stepped in to fill the gaps left by official policy.

As work dried up, some workers chose to look for new employers while others were poached or lured away from their official Approved Employer by promises of more work hours and better pay. Under normal circumstances, that should have been an eminently sensible move. Yet SWP workers’ visas are tied to specific employers: those who chose to move on were officially in breach of their visa conditions and labelled as ‘absconders’ – a term more often associated with escaping from custody with its connotations of criminality (Stead 2021). A much criticised government campaign targeted absconders, with posters in six Pacific languages warning that they ‘may bring shame to [their] family’s reputation’ and that they – and their families and communities – may be banned from working in Australia again. With a complete lack of sensitivity and subtlety, in search of such miscreants, Border Force even raided the home of an Australian Christian missionary in Bundaberg, who had long provided pastoral care to islanders, and whose crime was ‘referring unlawful non-citizens for work’ (Rice 2021). Such punitive and ‘characteristically patronising and insulting’ approaches abdicated responsibility for the (often very good) reasons SWP workers chose to move or leave the scheme (Stead 2021). If nothing else, the campaign against absconding – which was eventually recalled after a spate of negative media coverage – highlighted just how marginal and precarious SWP employment was, underlining workers’ status as unfree labourers who could not easily leave poor working conditions. In due course such clumsy incidents and repressive policies, in every state but so often in remote places, out of sight and mind, and beyond support and advocacy, suggested that it was not particularly wise, let alone humanitarian or ethical, to repress the owners of the hands that literally contributed to feeding them. In any case broader geopolitical changes were now occurring.

Impacts at home

Despite the challenges that some workers have faced in Australia, and the uneven flow of economic benefits, for many guestworkers, labour mobility brought substantial income gains, with workers reporting an average four-fold increase in income while employed through the SWP. Welfare benefits including increased household consumption, superior housing and improved school attendance by children have been documented in large-scale surveys, as have the development of soft skills, such as time and money management and improved English language ability (World Bank 2017). However, the utility of these skills in home villages is doubtful, and there is only limited evidence that returned workers utilised new practical skills. Many SWP workers worked on crops – such as grapes, stone fruit and mushrooms – that do not grow in Pacific climates, and many skills learned on the job are not easily transferred – or relevant – to home countries. Aspirations only exceptionally became outcomes. For workers who planned to return to Australia to work the next year, time at home represented an opportunity to rest and recuperate before another strenuous season. Consequently, beyond evanescent village stores, only limited evidence suggests that SWP employment leads to increased agricultural production or small business establishment (Petrou and Connell 2022). Ironically agricultural employment in Australia has allowed many islanders to move away from agriculture at home.

While initially focused on economic benefits, at the expense of social costs, the PICs have increasingly spoken out to express concern over problems that can accompany guestwork. Anecdotally, the SWP (along with New Zealand’s Recognised Seasonal Employer Scheme) has been associated with increased family breakdown, domestic violence and child welfare issues. In mid-2022, jilted Samoan women took to the national courts, seeking maintenance support for themselves and their children after their husbands abandoned them while employed overseas (Radio New Zealand, 15 June 2022). Women who remain at home invariably bear extra work and emotional burdens, so that, despite the schemes officially being committed to gender equality and women’s empowerment, the converse is often true. The equity of guestwork opportunities has also been questioned, as more remote parts of the PICs tend to miss out on recruitment, and opportunities to engage in the schemes can be linked to kin and other personal connections. Even within villages, inequity in selection, and thus in eventual returns, is one outcome (Petrou and Connell 2022). As opportunities at home are limited, wages and salaries are low, and more long-term mobility is possible, concern over a brain and skill drain has increased. Anecdotal evidence suggests that public servants are leaving Port Vila (Vanuatu), sorely needed i-Kiribati nurses are being recruited into Australia’s aged care industry (Marazita 2021), Fijian tourism workers are abandoning the domestic industry in droves in favour of PLS employment (Burgess and Voloder 2022), at least one Samoan computer professional was butchering carcasses in a Victorian abattoir and teachers, nurses and chefs have followed (Fatupaito et al. 2021; Sharman and Howes 2022). While these workers’ households will gain from the eventual remittances, such lost skills – however temporary – no longer contribute to the experience base of PIC economies and their need for national development. Balancing the benefits and costs of guestwork is not simple.

Regional directions

Late in 2021, the SWP and PLS were relaunched as two different streams of the Pacific Australia Labour Mobility (PALM) scheme. This revamp was intended to cut down on administration, improve welfare conditions and generally streamline processes. In addition, the SWP was opened up to any industry operating in eligible (regional) areas, SWP workers were able to transition to the PLS with their employer’s approval, and PLS visas were extended to a maximum of four years to enable workers to complete Australian qualifications if they wished. The new Australian Labour government in mid-2022 brought further changes with family accompaniment (with employer approval) slated to begin in 2023 and the announcement of a new Pacific Engagement Visa that would allow the permanent migration of 3,000 Pacific Islanders per annum to Australia. At the time of writing, details of these last two developments remain to be clarified. Nonetheless, there was growing concern over what the absence of households for several years might mean for home communities, deprived of family members and skills. Even the previous Coalition government’s Minister of Agriculture, David Littleproud, had stated that islanders were ‘precious human capital; they need their men and women there to build their nations’, and prolonged separation would surely pose social problems. But the mood in the room had changed. Rather than trying to lock Pacific guestworkers out of permanent migration opportunities, there was a general acknowledgement that Australia needed to improve relations with ‘our Pacific family’ if only to keep the threat of China at bay, and this was a valuable means of doing just that.

By the time the Labour government had taken over, Australian relations with the PICs had worsened with Scott Morrison promising climate change policies but failing to deliver them, and a previous Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, along with Peter Dutton, mocking the problems of sea level rise. Most egregious of all, the former Deputy Prime Minister, Michael McCormack, had said in 2019 that the PICs would survive ‘because of large aid assistance from Australia … and because many of their workers come here and pick our fruit … and we welcome them and we always will. But the fact is we’re not going to be hijacked into doing something that will shut down an industry … and I’m only talking coal, let alone all our other resources’. None of this went down well with the PICs while such perspectives accompanied China pursuing a maritime Belt and Road initiative in the region, and offering cheap loans and infrastructure to the PICs. Some PICs, including Solomon Islands, shifted their allegiances from Taiwan. Australia had announced in 2017 that it would ‘step-up’ its engagement with its ‘Pacific family,’ with relationships with PICs characterised by respect for them as equals, but as McCormack’s ungracious and patronising remarks indicated, little actually changed. Belatedly the arrival of the Labour government brought a rapid tour by the new Minister of Foreign Affairs, Penny Wong, through the region and more drastic steps to rebuild relationships and marginalise China. That included a greater commitment to more permanent migration – so that rather more of the ‘Pacific family’ might actually live in Australia. The Pacific Engagement Visa was consequently expressly designed by the Labour government to build a stronger ‘Pacific family’ where climate security had a central place, just one part of a suite of policies that responded to the China-Solomon Islands security pact in an attempt to ‘restore Australia’s place as the partner of choice in the region’.

Complicating matters, the pandemic had also brought a change in assertiveness and public responses from PIC governments over worker welfare. Previously, concerns over wage underpayments and welfare either received no public comment or merely resulted in admonishments from their own governments for workers to ‘behave themselves’ and be valuable country ambassadors. Disinclination to intervene was informed by cultural preferences to avoid conflict and fears that if their workers earned a bad reputation; employers would shift to recruiting from a different PIC. But, as WHM workers disappeared, and the value of Pacific guestworkers became apparent, PIC governments began to speak up. In late 2021, Vanuatu announced that it would temporarily suspend engagement with a large recruiter in South Australia until ‘welfare issues’ were addressed (Vanuatu Daily Post 2021). This was not the first time ni-Vanuatu workers had faced welfare issues in South Australia, but it was the first time Vanuatu’s Department of Labour had openly acknowledged them. Speaking at the Pacific Update conference in mid-2022, Vanuatu’s Commissioner of Labour, Murielle Meltenoven, expanded on the challenges that ni-Vanuatu workers face in Australia, including language difficulties when training is delivered in English; differences between expectations and realities of work which can lead to ‘absconding’; being tied to a single employer; unsuitable and inadequate accommodation; and, a lack of respect from employers. While she acknowledged that robust systems were in place, Meltenoven noted that the size of Australia and the lack of an in-country liaison officer to support workers meant the system was not working. She further expressed concerns over the impacts in Vanuatu of repeated family separation and brain drain as more skilled workers were choosing to engage in guestwork (Meltenoven et al. 2022). Samoa expressed similar concerns over its engagement in New Zealand’s scheme and temporarily suspended and then decreased worker departures. The tide appeared to be turning.

Whither mobility?

In many ways, the first ten years of contemporary guestworker schemes could be considered an affront to our nearest neighbours – in an increasingly strategic geopolitical area – where Australia’s fossil fuels are doing their bit to accelerate climate change and small Pacific island states bear the brunt of the impact. At the same time remittances were a massive boost to households and impoverished national economies, especially after tourism collapsed during COVID-19: guestwork has brought economic benefits, and neither workers, nor employers nor participating governments want it to end. While the PALM scheme has been framed as a development program for the Pacific delivered by Australia, as Australia glanced anxiously at China, what the pandemic emphasised is that the schemes were indispensable to Australia: Australian employers increasingly rely on Pacific Islander labour and many would be lost without guestworkers. Yet there was little acknowledgement of the important role Pacific Islanders played in the Australian economy.

Over their first decade Australia’s guestworker schemes were initiated and implemented with a rigidity designed to benefit farmers rather than temporary migrant workers, who had few advocates, remained largely invisible in remote rural locations, and they and their home countries were often reluctant to complain. Arguably this reflected a colonial model superimposed on the twenty-first century. Despite the scheme’s expansion, and new PIC pressure, there was little to suggest that the problems of precarious employment, such as wage theft, spurious deductions, inadequate accommodation (sometimes in converted pubs and draughty caravans), minimal monitoring or enforcement of regulations, and unsafe working conditions had really changed. Indeed, inequities and exploitation are constant reminders that a century later reminders of the old colonial blackbirding days had never quite disappeared (Connell 2010). Reform will require serious policy change that truly recognises guestworkers as people rather than units of labour. This would minimally involve movement towards policies aimed to ensure greater equity in selection of workers within and between PICs, the creation of quality employment, adequate wages, support for and monitoring of worker wellbeing, stronger protections against gender-based inequalities, and better job security (e.g. Wright 2022). More fundamentally, the policy of tying visas to particular employers needs to be rethought so that workers have the power to leave workplaces that may be exploitative, unsuitable – or even dangerous – without fear of reprisals. Early on, a former President of Kiribati, Anote Tong, called for ‘migration with dignity’, but there is some way to go. Australia'sFair Work Ombudsman has much to do. Islanders have proved, through their use of social media (Petrou and Connell 2019; Stead and Petrou 2022b), that they are actively navigating the opportunities and risks of the scheme, but they still need proper support, fairness and flexibility. It remains to be seen whether the PALM scheme will also offer more protection for workers, but the PICs, now in a stronger position, will no longer stand for poor treatment of their citizens.

The PALM scheme may also shift the geography of labour migration, and offer new opportunities to Kiribati and Tuvalu, facing existential threats from climate change, or favour ‘low mobility’ countries such as Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, and also Vanuatu, since few people in Australia claim Melanesian ancestry. It might also favour women, as jobs extend beyond agriculture and abattoirs, or even perhaps fractious unemployed youth, but the latter is unlikely. More likely perhaps, since Pacific Engagement Visas will be eagerly sought after, that old familiar biases and a continued brain drain may ensue. Perhaps a new ‘Pacific family’ will emerge in rural and regional Australia, but it is crucial that the schemes promote stronger PIC economies, and allow greater social stability: the basis of positive family ties. Yet this emerging age of migration has powerful and symbolic antecedents. In a new geopolitical order, it is time for a better deal for the descendants of the old blackbirds, and the heroes of Australia’s hazardous regions, that they not be destined to remain with insecure employment, income and accommodation: an excluded precariat.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kirstie Petrou

Dr Kirstie Petrou is a human geographer and research fellow at the Policy Innovation Hub, Griffith University. Her research interests include migration, urbanisation and development in the Pacific.

John Connell

John Connell is a Professor of Geography in the School of Geosciences, University of Sydney. He works mainly on small island development issues in the Pacific region and has published several books on migration and colonialism.