It is better to hand money in Australia because let's say creep all dam Invaratu for fortnit.
If you live.
One year for one year, he's more than you work in Fronoto for ten his.
That's Enoch from Vanuatu. He came to Australia on a temporary work visa, hoping to earn enough money to change his life back home. Just like Enoch, tens of thousands of workers from the Pacific and Team or Less Day have come to Australia through Palm the Pacific Australia Labor Mobility scheme. The government sells it as a triple win. Workers own Australian wages, Australian employers fell jobs they say they can't feel locally, and money flows back to families
and economies across the region. But Morgan Harrington's been investigating cases where workers say they were exploited, underpaid and overcharged by their employer for housing that was falling apart and overcrowded.
Eleven people and three dead rins.
Yes, how much money putting handbreak fifty one person?
And because a workers visa is tied to one employer, leaving can mean losing your legal status.
And when they raise their consent, they just say to them that if they don't want to work, they will send them back.
I'm Nicole Johnston and you're listening to seven am today post doctoral research manager at the Australia Institute, Morgan Harrington, and why the Palm scheme is ripe for exploitation and why some say it's a modern slavery risk. It's Monday, February sixteen. Morgan. Could you take us back to how this all started and what is the Palm scheme?
With the border reopening as part of the government's national Plan, can the Minister update the Senate on how workers from the Pacific and Team or less Day are contributing to Australia's rural economy helping so.
The Palm Scheme was formed in twenty twenty two with the merger of two previous schemes. Basically, what it means is that people from nine different Pacific Island nations and Team or Less Day can come to work to Australia, but only on a temporary basis and only in jobs that are classified as low skilled.
The changes follow extensive public consultation with Pacific island countries and our domestic industries, which will see a consolidated, improved and more efficient Pacific worker scheme benefiting employers, workers and participating countries.
The Palm Scheme's grown a lot, from just under six thousand people in twenty nineteen and now there's over thirty two thousand. The vast majority of people on the Palm Scheme work in agri culture or meat processing, but growing numbers are working in hospitality and aged care. And so for a program that's supposed to be for low skilled workers to work on a temporary basis, it's being used more and more in industries that are very much not temporary and which skills are needed for.
The Palm scheme will enable rural and regional businesses to engage the right workers more easily where and when they need them, alleviating.
Now, the Palm Scheme generates just under a billion dollars in economic value, but over eighty percent of that stays in Australia, so less than twenty percent is actually remitted to the Pacific. So if the Australian government wants to say that this is a win win, then we need to make sure that the economic benefits are more equitably distributed.
Could you explain to us how the visa is tied to one employer.
So if you apply to come and work as part of the Palm program, you get what's called an approved employer, That is the one business that you are allowed to work for, so they sponsor your visa and your status in the country depends on you staying to work for that employer for the duration of your Palm visa. If you want to leave, technically you can apply through your
employer to the government for a transfer. But when you're talking about people with no experience in Australia, maybe limited language skills, who have promised their family that they're going to come here and earn money, it's not realistic to think that they are going to go to their employer to complain and hope that their employer will go to the government and go through a bureaucratic process so that maybe they can move.
You've been investigating this scheme for a while now. One of the places that you went to to look into this was Leton, a small country town in New South Wales. Why did you go there and what did you find?
Well, look, Laton has a very long history of welcoming new migrants, it's a big agricultural community. It's a place where people who are new to Australia can find work more easily than maybe they can in Sydney or Melbourne. I spoke to a group of people from the Solomon Islands, all of whom had made the very difficult decision to
walk away from their employer. Now that's technically a breach of their visa, but they told me stories of being put in accommodation with eleven people living upstairs and eleven people living downstairs, and being charged one hundred and fifty dollars for the privilege another elevend people eleven bit on each floor. Yeah, on upstairs, at eleven downstairs, eleven upstairs.
With a fund three thousand plus they tech in one week.
Then there's no early privacy there because we'll cut it out.
We're hip up together.
In one I spoke a lot with a woman named Emelda Davis, who is an Australian South Sea islander. She works a lot with Palm scheme workers, and she recounted to me a story of men who were living in a rusted out caravan in North Queensland. Now this is in a place called Tully, which has the highest annual rainfall anywhere in Australia. But the floor of the caravan had rusted out, and so when the waters rose, snakes were crawling through the rusted out holes in the bottom of the caravan.
The river would rise and the water would come through the rust in the bottom of the caravan. They had five men in a caravan, and then the snakes would come through the rust of the floor into the caravan. Like they don't even live like that in Vana wat It, but yet they're paying top dollar to sleep in a caravan.
Poor accommodation is a really common source of complete Quite often the accommodation is provided by the employer, and that can enhance what is already or can already be a
really unequal power relationship. If you work on a farm or a factory and at night, your employer is transporting you in a vehicle owned by the employer to accommodation owned by the employer, and the employer is permitted to make deductions from your pay for every one of those privileges, the transportation, the accommodation, maybe even the furniture in your house. Maybe they've given you a mobile phone and are deducting
money from your pay to make up for it. Okay, so how much would you have left after the deductions? How much would you get paid?
Three hundred dollars for how much a week before TODA dollars?
Hearing stories of people left with less than one hundred dollars after working forty hours a week sadly all too common. Those kinds of reasons are leaving an estimated seven thousand people to disengage from the program and try their luck in Australia on their own.
Coming up, Can the government fix the palm scheme? Morgan is part of your investigations. You also went to Vanuatu, which is part of the scheme. What did you find out there?
So when you travel through Portvilla often you're in a public minivan and every conversation I had it was one of the first things people would bring up, Oh, you're from Australia, I've worked in Australia, or I've got a brother or a friend who's gone to work in Australia. It's something people really want to do because they can see that they there is the promise of earning the Australian dollar, and it's also something that even people in
relatively high paying white collar jobs are doing. So I spoke to a senior public servant who told me he had colleagues who were choosing to leave the vanahay Tou public service and come to work in Australia, you know, maybe as a fruit picker or a meat processor. And so you know, it's creating a labor drain. Places like Vanahaytu are losing a large number of people to Australia and New Zealand, and that has economic consequences and it has social consequences.
So I was in the tomato farm for two years and I did one year in Abatua with the Miadworks.
But I spoke to a young man in Vanahaytu who had been in Australia for four years as part of the Palm scheme. He worked at a tomato farm and he told me that he saw a couple of injuries.
His arm was already jammed inside the machine, jumped up his ends classic snapped it in half. We all ran towards him and chick if he was okay. Well, pieces said he couldn't fill his arm.
It was called his health insurance didn't cover that injury and he was basically taken to an airport and flown back to Vanahuaytu to deal with it there.
So his health assurance was not the one that could cover broken out. They just quickly take him back to the nearest airport, flew into the available international airport and taken back to the country.
And this goes to the heart of the problems with this game. If we want to have people in Australia contributing to our economy, paying taxes in our country, they don't get access to many care and we don't give them the help that they need if they get injured or fall sick.
This palm scheme, it was set up under the Morrison government, but now it's with the Albanese government. Do they know about all of these problems and what if they said about it?
Look, the problems with the scheme are no secret now. In twenty twenty five, the UN's Special Rapporteur on Contemporary Forms of Slavery released a report based on his investigations in Australia, and he found that the Palm scheme poses a risk of modern slavery to people from the Pacific and team or less Day and that echoed findings from the New South Wales government's Anti Slavery Commissioner, who also found that the program poses a risk of modern slavery.
Now that's led to New South Wales parliamentary inquiry which is ongoing. But these stories of problems with the scheme are rife and the solutions are really not that hard. They basically come down to giving workers the right to leave an employer if they have a problem with them.
So you say that it's relatively simple to try and fix the scheme, then why hasn't it been done? And do you think this type of program is basically just always ripe for abuse.
Look, I think this program has become a source of contention and if it's going to continue to expand, and if it is going to allow Australia to form good relationships with the Pacific, then we need to get it right now. And the least that we can do is treat people who have the right to work in Australia the same way that other people who are allowed to work in Australia are treated. And the right to choose your employer is fundamental to the idea of a free
labor market. So really, if employees were able to vote with their feet and leave an employer who might be doing the wrong thing. There would be a domino effect on the other kinds of problems that you see with this game. We pride ourselves as being the nation of a fair go and we look down our nose at countries in the Middle East that have really unfair guest worker programs. But we have many of the same kinds of problems with the Palm scheme right here in our backyard.
What are these seven thousand people who've left the scheme doing now?
So, what I found when I spoke to disengaged workers in Leyton is that because of the region's history of welcoming new migrants, they're able to find work and they're able to find people who will help them survive. Now, often that means taking piece work rates, maybe picking oranges. So rather than being paid per hour, you're paid per orange that you pick. Now, the people that I spoke to preferred this to being ripped off by their formal
Palm scheme employer in another part of the country. Are you picking orange?
Is like just depend on you? Nos are like what's and stun behind you and force you do this faster fusser like that.
But Gennipiicorus is free to do anything we want.
If you want to rest, they sit down. You want to go home, just go home.
But it puts them in a very vulnerable position because you know, maybe there are no oranges to pick this week, or maybe the work drives up for another reason, and so they're living a very precarious existence. And of course, without a proper long term visa, they could be made to leave the country at any time. But while I was in Vanawatu, I spoke to the head of their labor Commission and she told me that she regularly has people knocking on the door of her office saying, I'm
not sure what's happened to my family member. They've gone to Australia to work on this program. I haven't heard from them. They didn't come back when they were supposed to. Can you imagine how heartbreaking that would be. And as she also said to me, even for the ones who stick with their employer and do what they're supposed to, they're not treated fairly. And as she pointed out, people
are not just workers, they're people. So if we want to invite them into our country to work, then we need to treat them as people.
Morgan, thank you so much for explaining it all.
To us today.
Thanks for having me on, Nicole.
You can find more of Morgan's reporting on Palmdorf, a mini series for the Follow the Money podcast by the Australian Institute. Also in the news, the Liberal Party's new leadership team is backing one of the old policies that saw them lose the last election, nuclear power. Deputy Liberal Leader Jane Hume wouldn't be drawn on specifics, but says Australia needs to be open minded about lifting a ban on nuclear energy if it wants to bring down emissions
and reduce power prices. Leader Angus Taylor has also announced he won't be backing any changes to capital gains tax and New South Wales residents have been granted an extra public holiday for ANZAC Day this year. Premier Chris Mins has announced a two year trial public holiday on the Monday following ANZAC Day, which falls on a weekend in twenty twenty six and twenty twenty seven. WA and The Act are the only other states where residents get the
extra day off. I'm Nicole Johnston. This is seven am. Thanks for listening.