Highlights
- Foreign minister Marise Payne told a Senate Committee, the government wants to finalise agreements as soon as possible.
- A key concern among the ASEAN remains citizen welfare, following revelations of poor pay conditions
- Secretary of the Australian Workers Union Daniel Walton has directly approached ASEAN embassies, encouraging them not to sign up for the visa program
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A new agriculture visa promising to bring thousands of workers from Southeast Asian countries onto farms by Christmas 2021 has been plagued by delays and has also fuelled tensions within the government. The visa was ready to be rolled out in October, but more than four months on, not a single country has signed on.
The government had said the scheme would be offered to the 10 member nations of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), which include Thailand, Cambodia, Brunei, Myanmar, Philippines, Malaysia, Laos, Vietnam, Singapore, and Indonesia.
Agriculture Minister David Littleproud told SBS - the progress of the visa, announced last June, now rests with Foreign Minister Marise Payne.
"Well, I'm totally frustrated as are Australian farms. We put this in place on the first of October. The last thing to be done is for the bilaterals to be completed by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. That's their job. That's what they do day in day out and we expect them to do it.
The foreign minister has given myself and the Prime Minister a strong commitment that we'll be done in January, February this year. We expect that to be lived up to and then what we need to do is just get on with the job and prove to the rest of the world that we are a good industry in which we look after these citizens and make sure that they have a pathway, a pathway to permanent residency to become part of this great nation."
