Pressure on jobs summit to provide labour solution

National Farmers' Federation boss Tony Mahar says state and federal governments are not doing enough to alleviate staffing shortages, leaving the agriculture industry searching for more than 150,000 workers.

Mr Mahar was a panellist at the Bringing Dowerin Downtown lunch held at Crown today, ahead of the agricultural event later this week.

“If we are asking what’s been done in this space, the simple answer is not enough,” Mr Mahar told the room.

Mr Mahar said the upcoming Jobs and Skills Summit, to be held in Canberra in early September, needed to deliver.

“It can’t be a talkfest, it has to have short, medium and long-term deliverables that have to be measured,” Mr Mahar said.

“There’s been that many roundtables ahead of this jobs summit and we have taken part in all of them and we have been really clear about what we need.

“We need more people coming into this country, we need faster visa processing, we need better skills development at a vocational level and we need to make sure that students have a viable career.

“We have to do something about the labour challenges in this industry.”

Agriculture Minister Alannah MacTiernan, who joined Mr Mahar on the panel, said she would be asking for the federal government to create more visa categories at the jobs summit to increase the number of people coming to WA to work.

At a state level, Ms MacTiernan said the state government had sponsored many Pacific Islander workers, which had become a mainstay to abattoirs during the COVID-19 pandemic.

She also said the government was continuing its subsidies for backpackers and city folk to head to the regions and work in agriculture.

Biosecurity

Between foot and mouth disease and lumpy skin disease, Mr Mahar said the industry was “under siege” from biosecurity threats.

“We have to do better from a biosecurity standpoint because it underpins everything we do in this sector,” Mr Mahar said.

While he said Australia had done well to keep the disease out for 150 years, officials could not be complacent now the disease was in Bali.

“We are backing the system, but it has to improve because it’s never been in Bali and people go to Bali in the middle of winter in Australia,” Mr Mahar said.

“We have got to be more vigilant and we have to put more measures in place.”

Ms MacTiernan said the government was well-aware of the threat and had been bolstering its response since last year by ensuring farmers knew of the warning signs.

“I can assure everyone that our government has been absolutely alert to the fact to the increasing incidence of threat to the biosecurity,” Ms MacTiernan said.

“We made a decision last year to ramp up our preparedness and we have really elevated that budget and put in place a whole team that has been out there and has been able to ensure that we have, at a state level, have a crack team going around ensuring that all 14,500 livestock owners are constantly getting updates on what to look for.”