The Pacific Australia Labour Mobility scheme (PALM) is a crucial source of workers across regional Australia. About 32,000 people from nine Pacific nations and East Timor work in Australia under PALM.
Over seven months of researching the scheme — interviewing workers, employers, country liaison officers, trade union organizers, community volunteers and academics, as well as digging into the data on it — I did not encounter anyone who thought it was a bad idea.
However, there were many calls for change to make it work better for everyone. My new report, published on Monday, suggests where we could start.
Illustration: Mountain People
Who benefits from PALM now?
PALM has short and long-term streams. Under the short-term stream, operating since 2012, workers can stay for nine months to do seasonal jobs such as fruit-picking.
The long-term stream, introduced in 2018, allows for a four-year stay. Most long-term workers are employed in meat processing.
PALM is widely credited with delivering a triple win.
The first win is for Pacific participants and their communities.
In 2024 and last year PALM workers remitted A$450 million (US$316.8 million) to their home countries, an average of A$1,500 per person per month. The money bought food, paid school fees, upgraded housing and financed small enterprises.
Benefits flow beyond immediate families. After working in an Australian abattoir, Devid John Suma returned to Vanuatu and invested A$30,000 to supply clean drinking water to his remote village.
The second win is for Australia’s economy. PALM workers make a significant contribution to regional businesses that struggle to attract local workers, from farms to abattoirs.
The third win is that PALM advances Australia’s strategic interests, not least by providing a counter to China’s wooing of Pacific nations.
Pacific leaders might wish for more aid from Canberra and be frustrated by the government’s tepid action on climate change. However, well-paid work is something Australia offers that China does not.
Yet the wins of the PALM scheme have countervailing costs in the pain of separated families, loneliness and broken marriages.
PALM is dogged by reports of workers being abused, underpaid or housed in substandard, overpriced or overcrowded accommodation.
Thousands of PALM workers have quit their approved jobs, “disengaging” from the scheme. This breaches their visa conditions and leaves them vulnerable to exploitation.
Nevertheless, PALM has profoundly changed migration between the Pacific and Australia.
It brings workers to Australia from countries that have seen minimal migration to Australia since Federation, despite their geographic proximity — particularly the Melanesian countries of Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu that were sources of labor in the late 19th century, when indentured South Sea Islanders built Queensland’s plantation economy.
However, the future of PALM is not guaranteed.
Some Pacific countries, including Papua New Guinea, would like more of their nationals engaged under the scheme, while others worry it creates workforce shortages and disrupts community life.
Participation peaked at 34,830 workers in September 2023 and was at 32,365 in November last year. Numbers in the long-term stream are steady, but fewer short-term workers are being recruited, as employers revert to using backpackers — a cheaper, less regulated workforce — for seasonal jobs.
So, PALM has drifted from its original mission of filling seasonal gaps in the rural economy through annual circular migration to become a labor program for sectors such as meat processing and aged care with a constant demand for workers.
In April 2022, three-quarters of all PALM workers were in the short-term stream and one-quarter were long-term. Now, more than half of all PALM workers hold long-term visas.
The PALM scheme changes lives and communities in the Pacific and Australia, often for the better, but its problems must be addressed to realize its potential.
Australian employers would turn away from a scheme that is too bureaucratic, expensive or cumbersome. PALM’s future would not be secured by burying it under layers of rules and reporting.
My report has 10 recommendations to improve PALM. These include making it easier for PALM workers to change jobs, rather than tying them to a single employer; simplifying PALM scheme rules for employers; regulating labor hire at the national level; giving workers access to Australia’s Medicare health insurance while they are in the country to stop them missing out on medical attention; and reforming working-holiday programs by phasing out the second and third visas offered to backpackers who do work like fruit-picking in regional areas.
Australia’s interest in fostering Pacific development and rivalry with China are added reasons to limiting working holidays and expanding the PALM scheme instead.
PALM is a work in progress and would never be perfect. The scheme is shaped by the power differential between Australia and its Pacific partners. There are also tensions between three priorities: being a development program enhancing Pacific well-being, being a labor-market program benefiting Australia’s economy and serving a strategic purpose in Australia’s rivalry with China.
Yet, when it operates well, PALM is far more than transactional.
Beyond wages earned, jobs filled and diplomatic points scored, it also fosters cultural exchange and personal engagement, binding the peoples of Australia and the region more fully into a “Pacific family.”
Peter Mares is an adjunct senior research fellow at Monash University’s School of Media, Film and Journalism. This article was originally published in the Conversation.
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