CLANCY OVERELL | Editor | CONTACT
WE PROMISE YOU CAN HAVE SOME ASIANS INSTEAD! Australia’s agricultural sector are not holding their breath waiting for Morrison to deliver his new, long-promised, farm work visa program – which will apparently aim to funnel in residents from 10 South-East Asian countries to help Aussie farmers harvest their crops.
This follows a tough year for primary producers, who say that their output was limited by the lack of manpower available on farms that most Australians don’t want to work on unless they are getting paid good money.
For years, Australian fruit and dairy farmers have relied on the labour of sunburnt poms who are given the option to put themselves through 88 days of indentured servitude in order to get a visa extension long enough for them to ride out a couple summers in Bondi.
However, this supply of cheap labour looks to be discontinued after Scotty From Marketing visited London to strike a free trade deal with Boris earlier this week.
Boris is now looking for someone to fill the void left in their export market after the Brits irrationally decided to leave the EU – while Australia needs to find someone else to trade with after stirring up China to the point where they stopped buying our beef, wine, barley and iron ore. The UK, whose population makes up 4.3% of China’s – looks like our best bet.
Currently, there remains differences over tariffs and quotas on agricultural goods and Mr Morrison says he wants to go back to the good old days where we only sold stuff to England, around the time of the Wool Crash.
However, unfortunately for Australian farmers, the UK trade deal means there is no longer a requirement for British backpackers to work on our farms for 88 days – as the two Prime Ministers announced a new two-way visa would be established between our countries.
This means that fruit will keep rotting on trees until Morrison can somehow wrangle the impossible politics in his own government to convince the far-right supremacists that we need to bring in a bunch of brown and Asian workers to Australia to pick up the slack on the farms – people that look a lot like that family he has spent $90m trying to keep out of Biloela.
MORE TO COME.
