Thursday, 10 December 2020

Agricultural workforce

Mr T BULL (Gippsland East) (17:41): (5365) My adjournment is to the Minister for Agriculture in the other place, and the action I seek is the minister’s urgent intervention to rescue our vegetable season in the Lindenow Valley this year. The Lindenow Valley vegetable sector contributes over $150 million to the Victorian economy and they are entering their peak harvesting period. Whilst they employ hundreds and hundreds of local pickers, they also have a deep reliance on overseas workers. One farmer, Kane Busch, who is a friend of mine, was in the office as I was in Parliament this week saying that he is waiting on 152 pickers to arrive from Vanuatu. The reason that they cannot come into Victoria at the moment is because the quarantine process and appropriate structures have not been set up here in Victoria as they have been in other states of Australia.

Now, what we need is these vegetables to be picked, and we need to have the appropriate processes put in place by the minister to enable these visitors to arrive, as they have done every year for a number of years, to complement our local workforce. So I would ask the minister to urgently put in place the appropriate measures to allow these pickers to take up their work, and perhaps one good start might be announcing what the Tasmanian government has announced—that they will cover the cost of the quarantining for these seasonal workers to come into the state. But before that we need the pathway cleared with a structure put in place to be able to allow these workers to quarantine. It is not there now, and we are getting very, very close to peak picking season and this work needs to be done urgently.