The impact of changes to the UK work visa still an unknown for farmers

NFF Horticulture Council executive officer Richard Shannon said it would be interesting to see how this was going "to wash through" the seasonal workforce from July 1.

From July 1, this year, UK passport holders can be granted up to three separate Working Holiday visas without having to meet any specified work requirements. Before this change, UK applicants were required to accumulate 88 days of regional work which often involved roles in farming, fruit picking or mining.

Mr Shannon said UK passport holders made up a significant minority of backpackers in the country doing work in agriculture and so the impact of the change was yet to be seen.

"But we are concerned for what that might mean for growers," he said.

"Before the pandemic, we understood backpackers made up 80 per cent of our seasonal workforce, that is those people we need to harvest our crops, not the regular ongoing workforce, but the seasonal workforce.

"Since the pandemic when backpackers were actually asked, unfortunately, by the federal government to go home, our reliance and sources of labour have shifted significantly.

"We've seen a dramatic expansion of the PALM program where workers from Pacific Islands have been able to come over and fill those seasonal roles, but since travel restrictions have come off, we've seen backpackers flood back into Australia up to the same levels that they were pre-pandemic."

Mr Shannon said as a result growers were shifting their focus away from the PALM program and back towards backpackers for a number of different reasons.

He said it was mostly because of the greater flexibility these workers had in being able to move around the country and take up roles in the horticultural industry as harvest demanded.

"But it really depends on where you're attempting to grow food as this will have a big bearing on which workers you have access to. Backpackers are more commonly found closer to metropolitan centres and tourist attractions. For those growers who are more remote and not close to a population centre, they're always struggling to find workers," he said.

Mr Shannon said the seasonal workforce demand of the horticultural industry nationwide was around 30,000 workers.

He said the latest numbers from the federal department of home affairs for the number of visas granted was 140,000 as of June 2023.

"Of those, 30,000 or so are from the UK...followed by France at 21,000, Ireland 17,000 and Japan 12,000 so the UK is the leading source of backpackers by some margin," he said.

Mr Shannon said the change was a product of negotiations for the UK-Australia free trade agreement.

"Industry did not have a lot of say in it...we can only hope that the (federal) government got something really good in return for dropping the defined work requirement for UK backpackers," he said.

In contrast to Mr Shannon's views, Australian National Pickers spokesperson Nick Antonio said it was known in the past that the majority of the English backpackers were unsuitable for farm work.

Mr Antonio said there would be "absolutely zero impact" to his operation with the changes to the UK passport holders visa arrangements.

He said most of their 230 workers came from the Pacific region under the PALM scheme.