The summit has never been so far away

Next Thursday and Friday the great and good will assemble in Canberra for the Jobs and Skills Summit, the first major economic initiative of the new Albanese Government.

Led by the Prime Minister and Treasurer, the Summit will recommend immediate actions and opportunities for medium and long-term reform with the objectives of maintaining full employment, growing productivity, boosting job security and wages, lifting participation, and delivering a high‑quality labour force through skills, training and migration.

This is an ambitious agenda, and so should it be for an energised first term government with a point to prove.

But it’s a summit by name, and for the horticulture industry feels like a summit by nature as we sit as far away now from a secure, reliable and motivated seasonal labour supply as we’ve ever been.

Most concerning to industry is the apparent overconfidence of the Albanese Government that the Pacific Australia Labour Mobility (PALM) scheme is the single and only solution required to fix our seasonal labour shortage.

In twisting and bending the PALM scheme to meet our every labour need, we will almost inevitably undermine the very important role and purpose it was designed for in the first place. And that’s placing workers in longer term roles and creating longer term relationships between employer, worker and Pacific communities.  

The end result for industry of the current course of action is not just the scrapping of the long-conceived agriculture visa, but the potential undermining of the one piece of the labour supply puzzle that’s been working reasonably well.

Putting all our eggs in one basket isn’t just putting the eggs in jeopardy, it’s also going to overburden and ruin the basket.

And while Agriculture Minister Murray Watt as recently as a few weeks ago while on the ground in the Lockyer Valley reiterated his willingness to revisit other initiatives, he did suggest we had to first wait until the PALM scheme had been shown to fail fitting every piece of the puzzle.

Giving growers even less confidence moving forward is the increasing openness that the reliance on the PALM scheme has more to do with satisfying geopolitical needs than the productivity and international competitiveness of Australian fruit, vegetable and nut businesses.

Nevertheless, Growcom on behalf of its members and the wider industry is committed to reaching the summit and guiding government in the right direction with as few diversions as possible.