Illegal workers rife in rural Victoria
Andrew Rule
Herald Sun
March 27, 2014 8:00PM
Illegal fruit and vegetable pickers are rife in rural Victoria, writes Andrew Rule.
THE man on the line thought he had an Australian vegetable farmer wanting to hire cheap illegal labourers on the black market. He was salivating over the easy money he’d rake off.
He could send people anywhere, he boasted. You want workers in Victoria or Queensland? Or England? He could do that, too.
When he realised he was talking to a reporter out to expose black market “gang masters” — not someone wanting to pay him to pimp cheap workers — he hung up.
It’s a shady business and he didn’t want to be caught. You can bet nothing much has changed since that conversation in 2009. The racket is still going strong on some Australian farms, not to mention building sites.
This week, Emma Field of The Weekly Times broke the first of a two-part special on illegal workers allegedly labouring long hours for low pay on Gippsland properties that produce tonnes of salad leaves.
Part one was carefully worded by the lawyers to say that one of Victoria’s “biggest horticultural enterprises” stands accused of using illegal workers in unsafe work conditions.
Part two, next Wednesday, will expose other properties exploiting the same alleged rort — and accuse compliant politicians and public servants of turning a blind eye to an industry that relies so much on “illegals” that no one seems to want to police it.
Field has spent months gathering fresh evidence at the East Gippsland end of a racket that is all over eastern Australia.
From Mildura to Bairnsdale, “illegals” have been packed into old houses and charged exorbitant rates for it. I have seen tumbledown dumps at Sale and Swan Hill where 15 people share three bedrooms and one overloaded septic tank.
Shadowy “gang masters” use fleets of vans to pick up the pickers at dawn to ferry them to and from properties. People being paid as little as $13 an hour are stitched up for rent and transport so that their “take-home” pay can be less than $10 an hour.
In the rare event of Immigration officers raiding them, more “tourists” and “students” fill their place.
Most are Asian, some are from the Middle East. Many are on student visas issued by questionable people for questionable courses. Others are on tourist visas and therefore forbidden to work in Australia.
It all hinges on a loophole: growers and orchardists retain the “contractors” to provide labour and the contractors employ the workers. This puts a “firewall” between growers and workers.
The “illegals” tolerate bad conditions because they fear being deported. But they can be working an angle, too.
Bogus students pay for dodgy courses, hoping to qualify for permanent residency as they work under the radar. It’s migration by stealth, with the silent collusion of everybody who stands to make money. The racket is an open secret. Around Sale, Shepparton, Swan Hill and Mildura, locals quietly point out the shabby, overcrowded houses and the white vans with the darkened windows.
Everybody knows why the pickers tend to wear not just hats and sunglasses but other headgear that obscures their faces.
Everyone knows that a house worth between nothing and $200 a week is charged out at $80 a head or more — effectively extorting more than $1000 a week.
In Britain, where 23 Chinese illegal immigrants were drowned while gathering shellfish in 2004, at least the black market racketeers can get up to 10 years’ jail. Here, they seem to get a nod and a wink.
AND those running properties where the suspected illegal workers toil don’t seem to have to endure much more than occasional negative publicity and criticism by frustrated union officials.
The contractors and owners mostly have the workers bluffed and docile. There have been exceptions.
“It’s the wild west out there in the season,” a contact once told me about the summer picking season in the Swan Hill district. “The pickers are covered up so you see nothing but their eyes and if someone official turns up they scatter and run.”
One farmer up that way was known as a hard man who stood over “illegals”, refusing to pay the agreed amount after weeks of work, knowing they were too frightened of being caught and deported to resist.
But he met his match when he tried the same tactics on some Irish, English and German backpackers. They chased him and broke the lights and aerials on his vehicle. Since then, locals say, he hires only non-English speakers.
Another notorious grower, north of Nyah, goes further. He hires illegal workers, doesn’t pay them for several weeks then secretly informs the Immigration Department so the workers get arrested at night and taken away.
The grower gets free labour. The department gets arrests. Everyone’s a winner except the workers. But they keep coming.
Let’s see what the politicians and bureaucrats say about it when The Weekly Times hits the doorstep with more allegations next week.
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