Young Australians should consider taking a gap year to pick fruit and vegetables because it would make a great “Instagram moment,” Australian Deputy Prime Minister Michael McCormack said.
“If you know somebody who might be on the coast, who might be lounging around with a surfboard, tell them to come to the regions,” he said on Wednesday. “Bring their mobile with them because it would be a great Instagram moment for them to get up the tree to pick some fruit.”
The comments come as Australia’s state and federal governments try to get university students and school leavers to take up farm jobs as it grapples with a shortage of seasonal labor, which industry groups warn could result in produce being left to rot and higher grocery costs.
Australia’s borders remain mostly closed to international workers, while domestic border restrictions introduced to stem the spread of COVID-19 have limited local worker mobility and exacerbated the shortage.
The country’s horticulture sector is to face a shortfall of 26,000 workers in the coming six months, a Ernst & Young report said, adding that the shortage might also hit the grains harvest.
“Usually at this time of the year, there are about 140,000 backpackers in Australia, 30 percent of which are employed in agriculture. Right now, there are only 67,000 backpackers in the country,” Australian National Farmers Federation chief executive Tony Mahar said in a statement.
The shortage could see some growers left with no option but to plow “ripe crops back into the ground,” Mahar said.
Industry groups are calling for Canberra to consider urgently restarting a program to allow overseas workers to enter the country to fill the gap.
The Australian government is considering incentives for workers on unemployment benefits to take up farm labor, as well as scrapping an age limit on its working holiday visa to allow people aged 31 and above to continue to work in agriculture, the Australian newspaper reported.
French authorities yesterday said that they would close a Paris mosque as part of a clampdown on radical Islam that has yielded over a dozen arrests following the beheading of a teacher who had shown his pupils a cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed. The mosque in a densely populated suburb northeast of Paris had disseminated a video on its Facebook page days before Friday’s gruesome murder, railing against teacher Samuel Paty’s choice of material for a class discussion on freedom of expression, a source close to the investigation said. The French Ministry of the Interior said the mosque in Pantin, which has
LONGSTANDING NEUTRALITY: The US request came as it vied for influence in Southeast Asia with China, but Indonesia has never let foreign militaries operate there Indonesia this year rejected a proposal by the US to allow its P-8 Poseidon maritime surveillance planes to land and refuel there, four senior Indonesian officials familiar with the matter have said. US officials made multiple “high-level” approaches in July and August to Indonesia’s defense and foreign ministers before Indonesian President Joko Widodo rebuffed the request, the officials said. Representatives for Indonesia’s president and defense minister, the US Department of State’s Office of Press Relations and the US embassy in Jakarta did not respond to requests for comment. Representatives for the US Department of Defense and Indonesian Minister of Foreign Affairs Retno Marsudi
COVID-19 UNDER CONTROL: The two prime ministers agreed to ease entry bans, and allow short-term business visits and reopen flights between Vietnam and Japan Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga, in his first overseas summit since taking office last month, yesterday agreed with Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc to step up defense and security cooperation in the face of China’s expanding influence in the region. In talks in Hanoi, Suga and Phuc set up a basic agreement allowing Japan to export defense equipment and technology to Vietnam. Japan has been pursuing such agreements to bolster ties with Southeast Asian nations and sustain its own defense industry. Suga said that his four-day trip to Vietnam and Indonesia would be key to pursuing the “free and open Indo-Pacific” vision
Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte on Monday night said that he has no problem with being held responsible for the many killings under his crackdown on drugs, and that he is ready to face charges that could land him in jail, but not charges of crimes against humanity. Duterte’s televised remarks were among his clearest acknowledgement of the prospects that he could face a deluge of criminal charges for the bloody campaign he launched after taking office in the middle of 2016. Police have reported that at least 5,856 drug suspects have been killed in raids and more than 256,000 others arrested since
RSS