Wednesday, 31 August 2022

Statements on reports, papers and petitions

Department of Treasury and Finance

Budget papers 2022–23

Ms LOVELL (Northern Victoria) (17:13): I rise to speak on the state budget 2022–23, which raises the budget for the agricultural portfolio. I actually want to speak largely about an issue that I spoke about last night on the adjournment, and that is the shortage of harvest labour in Victoria. Last night, on the budget, I raised this as being the third year that our horticulturalists are facing the prospect of not being able to harvest their fruit at its premium, which will cost them millions of dollars. In my adjournment I asked the minister what action she has taken or if she would reveal what plans she has put in place, including what discussions she has had with the federal government, to ensure that Victoria’s horticultural industry has access to sufficient seasonal workers to harvest our valuable fruit and vegetables this coming season.

I acknowledge that the state government is not responsible for visas et cetera, but I outlined in my adjournment matter that the horticultural industry believes the answer to their shortage is Pacific Islander workers, and they need assistance from the state government to actually lobby the federal government to make sure these workers are coming in. The minister does not seem to understand that she is the minister and as such she has responsibilities to the horticulturalists to assist them with this. She also does not seem to understand that she has a whole department to assist her to do that. She kept pushing it back on me—about what my solutions were. The reality is I had given her the solution—which is the Pacific Islander workers—yet she carried on about free TAFE and the lack of skilled workers around the world. Well, these are not necessarily highly skilled workers. They are not workers that need to go to TAFE. These are workers that know what they are doing. Before COVID they were coming in every year and doing this work that Australians no longer wish to do. We used to have a number of itinerant workers that moved around the country that did this work, but as we know, they have become harder and harder to get. Backpackers, holiday-makers and uni students were also a source of labour, but they have dwindled off in recent years as well. This year, with the shortage of workers everywhere, university students are going to be able to get much more appealing work in hospitality rather than the hard work of picking fruit in the sun with snakes et cetera around.

The minister did suggest that I should have made an appointment with her rather than raise this issue in Parliament, which is actually rather ridiculous. I mean, these ministers do not meet with members of the opposition as a general rule. We have been told today by the Minister for Health that we cannot raise a health issue in Parliament, but that was soon rescinded when that was exposed. The Parliament is a place where we have the right to raise the issues of our constituents, and we should not have to make appointments.

The minister encouraged me to come and see her and said she was happy to take me through what Agriculture Victoria is doing in Victoria. So I took the minister up on that opportunity straight after the adjournment because I was interested to hear what Agriculture Victoria were doing to solve this issue. But unfortunately the minister did not brief me on what AgVic are doing, she merely quizzed me on what the problem was and asked me to go through the issues that I had already raised on the adjournment—the fact that we need tens of thousands of workers and the reasons we need them. She did not have any answers. In fact I do not think that the minister had one iota of a notion that there was an issue with harvest labour in Victoria. She needs to get out. She needs to meet with horticulturists. She needs to meet with the Victorian Farmers Federation. Their president is a horticulturalist herself. She is a vegetable grower, and she will certainly tell the minister about the shortage of harvest labour and what that means for growers. There were many, many acres of vegetables that were just ploughed back into the fields last year and fruit that just went to waste because there was not a labour force to take it off the trees or off the vines. We need to make sure that this government has a focus on getting workers to the farms and to the orchards in Victoria to make sure that they can harvest their crops at their optimum and make some money this summer.