LAWRENCE, Mrs Michele, Dairy farmer; and Chair, People and Communities Policy Advisory Group, Australian Dairy Farmers Ltd [by video link] McGOVERNE, Mr John, Policy Manager, Workforce and Capability, Australian Pork Ltd [by video link] PITTARD, Mrs Tanya, General Manager, Policy and Industry Engagement, Australian Pork Ltd [by video link] POPE, Mr Nathan, Policy Manager, Australian Dairy Farmers Ltd [by video link] PYERS, Mr Michael Peter, General Manager, Workplace Relations and Legal Affairs, National Farmers' Federation RYAN, Mr Tim, Chief Executive Officer, Australian Meat Industry Council [by video link] [09:03] CHAIR: I now welcome witnesses participating in a primary production roundtable to give evidence. Thank you for appearing before the committee. Although the committee does not require you to give evidence under oath, this hearing is a legal proceeding of the parliament. The giving of false or misleading evidence is a serious matter and may be regarded as a contempt of parliament. The evidence given today will be recorded by Hansard and attracts parliamentary privilege. Thank you for your submissions to the inquiry. I'll now invite each organisation to make a short opening statement of no more than two minutes each. We have to keep the time strict; otherwise we won't be able to get through you all and then ask the questions that we need to ask to get a good idea of where you're coming from. If you can make those short statements, then we'll open up for very general discussion and we'll be able to hear more from you. We'll start with Mr Pyers from the National Farmers' Federation. Mr Pyers : Thank you, Chair, and thank you, members of the committee, for the opportunity to appear this morning, address the committee and make submissions. You have the submission of the National Farmers' Federation with you. We need to go, in my view, to the words in the terms of reference: 'value of skilled migration to Australia'. Value is a subjective thing. What you and I perceive as being of value can be entirely different, and it can be influenced by a range of factors, including the background of the individual or groups concerned. It can be influenced by culture. It can also be influenced by education. But one of the things that cannot be argued about, in my view, is the role that migration has played in the socioeconomic development of Australia since World War II and the value that migration has brought to the table in that regard. I know that there's debate in the body politic at the moment regarding the number of migrants and things like that, but, from the NFF's point of view, the number is not an issue. What can't be denied is the fact that immigration has brought value to the economy, to the country and to everything else from that point of view. I'll leave my opening remarks there. I look forward to answering your questions. CHAIR: We'll come back for a discussion. I now call on Australian Pork Ltd to make a quick statement. Mrs Pittard : The Australian pork industry is a very domestically focused industry, and the migrants settling and working within our industry are highly valued. The pork industry employs more than 36,000 people within Australia and we have the capacity to employ even more than that, with more local processing and local small goods manufacturing. The industry, however, faces significant challenges attracting and retaining staff, and we require an increasingly skilled workforce due to the technical and integrated nature of our supply chain. These shortages are exacerbated by diminishing labour supply within regional Australia. The most recent survey of our pork producers found that approximately 60 per cent reported a shortfall of staff. The survey results indicate that the labour deficits have been primarily caused by poor social perceptions of our industry, but we work hard to demonstrate that a career within the pork industry is highly rewarding and requires a highly skilled workforce. The migrant labour who are contributing to our industry are highly valued. They are highly skilled. Many of them come in with veterinary skills and a lot of education. We work with them and support them, and they become integral members of their farm workforce but also their local communities. Some of the technical skills that are coming in are people with technical husbandry and animal husbandry skills, particularly around the breeding, farrowing and animal care space. We also have significant skills within that biosecurity space as well as nutrition growth and productivity. There are innovations in automation, but we've also got highly technical roles, particularly within that genuine emissions reduction and abatement space, where we need people who are able to operate the quite technical machinery that operates those emissions reduction systems within a farm. We're grateful for the opportunity to come and speak with you today and answer any questions, and to talk about the value of the varying forms of labour that are contributing to our industry. CHAIR: Thank you very much for your presentation. Australian Dairy Farmers? Mr Pope : Dairy farming is a continuous production system. Unlike seasonal agriculture, cows must be milked and cared for every day. Modern dairy farms require increasingly skilled workers—roles involving herd management, animal health, machinery operation, environmental compliance and other advanced farming systems. Australian Dairy Farmers continue to prioritise attracting and training local workers. However, many dairy regions are experiencing very tight labour markets, ageing populations and shortages—so it makes it difficult to source local workers. Skilled migration has become an important complement to the domestic workforce in dairy. It provides some significant social cultural values to regional Australia. But we need the right people at the right time with the right skills. We've seen some great examples through the well-managed migration programs such as the PALM scheme; that's been utilised by Australian Fresh Milk Holdings in New South Wales. That program has supported a workforce for that business. It strengthened the organisation but also the local community—schools, sporting clubs, churches, the regional businesses. It has provided some big benefits. We've seen migrant workers come in through permanent residency programs. They've undertaken farm management and ultimately moved into farmer ownership, and now they're demonstrating value to the long-term viability of the industry. In saying that, we have a framework that doesn't reflect some of the realities of modern-day farming. We've had recent submissions around making sure that entry-level workers through to senior herd managers are available to our industry. It's not just the technical nature; it's also the ability to put cups on teats. It's important to make sure we have that widespread. Some of the associated timeframes and the costs associated with the programs—we're price takers as an industry. It's important for us to be able to manage those costs and properly budget for that. If we see long-time delays in terms of getting people on, then generally our workers and our farmers have to pick up that time and work to fill in those gaps. It's important to make sure we have that 'people first' mentality, making sure that we've got the safety of our farmers and our workers but that we get who we need at the time. Another aspect is ensuring that the frameworks allow for opportunities to bring people in. At the moment, we're trying to work through a situation where we've got 12 various families from Denmark, the Netherlands and Canada that want to come to Australia and own and operate dairy farms. These are people that are highly skilled in their home countries, but we don't have the ability to bring them in and give them the confidence of residency for them to make that investment. We're working through, and Home Affairs and the various agencies are helpful, but it's aspects like that that we need to tighten up to support our industry. CHAIR: Thank you very much. We'll come back to some questions. Australian Meat Industry Council? Mr Ryan : I very much welcome the opportunity to present to you this morning on this important subject. Our organisation represents the post-farm-gate meat industry; that includes meat manufacturing, processing and smallgoods makers. Meat manufacturing is the single-largest manufacturing employer in the country now; it's an important and significant part of the broader economy, also underpinning food security. Across various businesses, approximately one-third of our workforce comes through a migrant labour program, be it skilled or unskilled or semi-skilled, but that varies widely across the different business types in the industry, with some businesses relying on more than 50 per cent for their workforce needs through a migrant labour program. The people that come through these migrant labour programs play an important role in the communities in which they live, and they often integrate very well in the local workforce. Nevertheless, we are heavily reliant on skilled migration to meet critical skill shortages. However, the current settings are incompatible with the needs of business to make significant investment decisions and innovate. Particularly without assured labour supply, we see huge challenges on the horizon. It's critical that this inquiry acknowledges and considers not only skilled migration settings at a policy level but also how these instruments are administered to provide the necessary skilled workers and promote business confidence—particularly when we're navigating large exogenous shocks, be it changing seasonal conditions such as drought in Australia or changes in global settings. When we've got very rigid migrant labour mechanisms, it's hard to navigate these big shocks to our industry. Skilled migration is and will remain a fundamental part of our industry and the ongoing viability of Australia's food security and our export competitiveness. Targeted, responsive and well-supported migration labour settings are essential to ensuring that Australia remains competitive globally but also that critical industries like meat processing can continue to grow. CHAIR: We'll now go to an informal discussion—a Q&A and a discussion. I might kick off. I've got a couple of questions. We'll do two questions each and see how time goes. Feel free to jump in as well if you want to answer a particular question that's being discussed. I might go to Mr Michael Pyers. Obviously, we've heard from everyone, and pretty well everyone has said that they are reliant on a lot of skilled migration. In terms of skilled migration and the numbers that are coming in, we've heard about animal husbandry and the meat industry. The committee visited Thomas Foods in Adelaide recently and saw the incredible workforce that they have down there and how reliant they are on migrant workers. We've been hearing a lot over the last few days about the migration debate. If we were to cut the numbers or change the system and reduce the intake across the board, how would that affect the Farmers' Federation and your members? Mr Pyers : It would affect our members significantly. The reason why I say that is that, first and foremost, there is a substantiated skill shortage within the agriculture sector. I can't confirm that number off the top of my head, but it's in the ballpark of about 170,000. If you play around with the numbers, there will be fewer people. There will be fewer people to do the work and so forth and so on. There is then the question of what we are going to do. Is it going to be skilled migration? Is it going to be unskilled migration? The reality is that, if you cut the numbers in the PALM scheme, you're going to have fewer people picking fruit, and, frankly, we don't want to see that happen. So that's an important consideration for lawmakers to consider. From our perspective at the National Farmers' Federation, skilled migrants bring considerable expertise to the table in terms of the operation of highly complex machinery and management skills. They can bring a different perspective of how to do things from other parts of the world, which we can all learn from. For example, one of the things we're doing at the National Farmers' Federation is that we're starting to work with the French embassy to try and have an interchange, for want of a better word, between Australia and France in terms of French students coming out to Australia and possibly Australian students going to France and so forth and so on. We believe that that sort of interchange is key and important as well. That's why I said earlier that it's really not the numbers. The numbers are important, don't get me wrong. But the numbers are not as important as what you do, where you allocate the people and so forth and so on. CHAIR: Would anyone else like to add to that particular answer? Mrs Pittard : Yes. I could just support that with some numbers from the pork industry. Around 56 per cent of our labour is from overseas. It's a very diverse workforce. It's a critically important workforce. Even within the most recent conversations about the impact of the global trade disruptions on industries—that workforce access, any disruptions or inability for the workforce needs to be met by our industry creates a significant animal welfare and biosecurity risk. Our industry operates along a continuous supply chain. We don't have the capacity to hold animals on farm for a significant period of time. Our entire system relies on animals moving through the farming system into transport and then through into the processing sector. So the migrant labour is an absolutely critical component of our productivity. It's an absolutely critical component of our industry being able to operate. Around 56 per cent of our labour is coming from overseas, so they are an absolutely crucial component to our industry being able to operate. CHAIR: Would anyone else like to add? Mrs Lawrence : I would like to add that this is fundamentally about sustaining food production in regional communities. I concur with the previous two speakers: we need the right people in the right places for our farms to operate. Without the right people, we'll have other issues and maybe reduced production. So it's very, very important to us, in dairy, to have the right people as well. CHAIR: Mr Ryan, from the Meat Industry Council? Mr Ryan : I'll just make— CHAIR: And, just for your information, the committee visited Thomas Foods last week and looked at their operations and what they were doing with skilled workers. Mr Ryan : I'm sure that was a very enlightening visit. I suppose it doesn't necessarily need to be a hypothetical question. I think we're seeing some of the challenges at the moment, with the impact on our administration and settings really restricting how we operate today—not necessarily if we were to reduce numbers in the future. Particularly, I think, at the moment, the delays in getting a skilled-migration visa process—some of which are up to 12 months—really inhibit any business decision-making and future investment. If I was a business, around the world, looking to build an abattoir, then the inability to get a skilled workforce up and running and tap some of these migrant labour programs would be a major barrier to me deciding to invest in a business in Australia. But also, the inability to rely on timely visa-processing means that we can't respond to changes in global trade—to manage the disruption, say, in fuel supplies of late—but also respond to changing seasonal conditions, which then impacts farmers and creates blockages throughout the system as well. So it really inhibits us today. If we were to see a reduction in visa numbers or migrant labour numbers, it would just compound those effects even more. CHAIR: If there's no-one else, I will go to my Deputy Chair, Mr Rebello. Mr REBELLO: Thanks for appearing before the committee. There have been a few references to visas, and I was just hoping you could clarify and break down the types of visas that you're referring to. For example, what proportion are holiday-makers and what proportion are on other types of visas? Maybe we'll take that as the first question. Mr Pyers : Insofar as working holiday-makers are concerned—and this is off the top of my head only—I think the number that has been talked about was in the ballpark of 80,000 or so. As I said, don't 100 per cent quote me. But working holiday-makers are important because they are an integral component of the skilled or unskilled or semi-skilled workforce, along with the people coming in from the PALM countries, who are equally important. Mr Pope : I can add some statistics to that. Dairy Australia's Power of People 2024 Workforce Survey showed that 42 per cent of farms used overseas workers, compared to 18 per cent in 2020. So that's quite a significant increase. Thirty-one per cent of those farmers had hired workers on working holiday visas, 17 per cent on employer sponsored visa programs, and one per cent had used the PALM scheme. So there was quite a varied split. Mrs Pittard : Within the pork industry, 57 of our pork industry businesses operate through the Pork Industry Labour Agreement. So they're bringing in staff through the Pork Industry Labour Agreement. As to the other visas that staff are coming in on, most of our staff are highly skilled and permanently employed, so they're on the 482, the 186 and the 494 visas. I'll have to take on notice getting you the actual figures for the percentages of the use of those visas and the numbers. But, yes, as I said earlier, around 56 per cent of our industry is utilising labour from within the migration system—using the 482, 186 and the 494 visas—as well as 57 businesses, which are the larger businesses, because the requirements within the pork industry labour agreement are quite comprehensive, and it takes a significant investment by the business to meet all of those requirements in order to bring labour in through pork industry labour agreements. CHAIR: Anyone else like to add to that? Mr Ryan : From the meat industry side, there are two main mechanisms. The PALM is for unskilled and semi-skilled. There are 11,000 people in meat industry jobs coming through the PALM scheme at the moment. The other visa data is a whole lot harder to collate; it's a bit messy. There are probably about 10,000 people coming through our skilled migration pathway. The main one for us is the meat industry labour agreement under a 482 visa. CHAIR: Mr Rebello. Mr REBELLO: To follow up, the reason I was asking about the types of visas is that under the temporary skilled migration program we haven't seen too many farmers. I think it's fewer than 300 farmers that were granted visas in 2024-25, compared to the 500 ICT managers and almost 1,700 cafe and restaurant managers. The reason I asked the previous question is that we want to make sure that we're bringing in migrants who are going to the right areas. Do you have confidence that the migrants that are coming in are going to the right areas for your industry? CHAIR: Who would like to kick off with that one? Mr McGoverne : The people in the pork industry who are bringing employees in under labour agreements are hiring them for specific businesses and, therefore, specific areas. They predominantly come from countries with a background in the pork industry, so there are quite large Filipino and South African contingents that come in under the pork industry labour agreements. That, generally, is the result of their having significant experience in pork production because it's a highly specialised industry, so we need people with specific skills in that industry. Those people that come in are skilled in raising pigs and are brought to go into a specific area. They are predominantly in country areas, for obvious reasons. As was alluded to earlier, they make a significant contribution to the local communities. In some cases, where schools are closing in rural areas, they have made a significant increase to the numbers attending, particularly primary schools, and have integrated into the community very well. CHAIR: Thank you. Ms Louise Miller-Frost. Ms MILLER-FROST: Thank you all for appearing. I'm absolutely fascinated by the very high level of migrant worker usage in your various industries. I'm particularly interested in going back to that difference between temporary visas and permanent visas and that high use of PALM workers and holiday workers and the like. Are those visas used because that works for your industries or is it because it's too hard to get the permanent migrant visas for these workers? Mrs Lawrence : I would say that the process is long, complex and costly, and that can be an inhibiting factor in attracting the people we need. In the dairy industry, we tend to use the working holiday-maker visa to fill a gap as we seek a longer-term employee. We've requested, in our OSCA submission, to maintain senior dairy cattle farmer. It's been recognised as a skill level 4. We actually need that position to be recognised on the CSOL now so that we can employ people earlier. I think we need long-term career pathways to come up through the industry. When you operate in Australia—and I guess my lived experience is—we actually work across multiple disciplines. Farming in one country can be very different to another. We can attract people from a lot of countries with experience in dairy farming, but we need them to come to Australia and experience our system and the high levels of animal welfare and the high levels of regulation around food safety we have. We can really, really benefit from that. We are so short on skilled labour that we're not taking away from our local workforce. They are genuinely additive, and they do bring cultural and social perspectives to our local community. They create and foster tolerance and understanding of what's happening elsewhere in the world. I would definitely say that we need that process to be easier and smoother—seamless. Mr Pope : I might just add there that we do have some seasonality in terms of requiring additional staff for short periods, such as during calving or during peak periods, so there is that curve of need and demand within our industry. You may actually tap into more of a working holiday-maker as opposed to the long term, but you need to have that basis of good skilled workers within the system and within the farm to be able to actually train and bring up those people. If you rely too heavily on the short term, then you do actually wear down your farmers with the training and the inductions and having to go through that churn each time. So it's important to, again, as we said, to have the right people there, but you bring in the others as you need to support our production. Mrs Lawrence : At the moment, there is genuine training fatigue of farmers who are continually trying to bring people in, but there are some very genuine success stories of working holiday-makers who come in, and they love it. They find their place in the world, and then they go through the dealer pathway. That is so very critical and important to us. Mr Ryan : Just to add to that as well: I completely agree. The people that come in under these various visa programs not only play a really important role in the communities in which they live but also the workforce. If there are more efficient and streamlined ways to make that pathway to permanent residency easier and with greater certainty, it would allow businesses to also invest in those people further, knowing that they can continue to be in the workforce for a longer period of time. It would also give those workers a lot more certainty as well. Mrs Lawrence : One of the things we find is that we are so short on people that—I don't know if I can use the word poaching—but we are so short on staff that you'll bring someone in on a pathway, which can be very expensive for a farmer, only for another farm to take them. It would be great to have that cost shared if that happens. Thank you. Mrs Pittard : From the pork industry perspective, we don't have so much of the seasonality. We have a very continual, constant supply chain. Obviously, with 56 per cent of our on-farm labour being from migrant workers, you want to be able to have them go through those training processes—to go through the induction, to get to know the farm, the farm practices and to really be able to settle themselves within the community. I think you asked about seasonality. We certainly note that, particularly through the PILA, it is an extraordinarily expensive process that involves a significant commitment by the farm and the farm business to put everything in place to bring workers in through the PILAR, so, obviously, they absolutely want to retain them. I'd also like to make the point that this is not inexpensive labour. This is labour that, in a lot of cases, costs as much as or more than utilising local labour if it were available. We would absolutely like to see these pathways be very effective and very efficient. We'd like that certainty. We'd like to see those people coming in on the agricultural visas to work in the agricultural industries absolutely prioritised through the processing of those visas because you really do need that labour certainty, and you do need to be able to confidently make investments in your farm business in order to be able to attract, retain and support those workers coming in. Ms MILLER-FROST: Mr Pyers, do you have something you want to say? Mr Pyers : I merely wanted to indicate NFF's full support for the previous speakers and what's already been put. Ms MILLER-FROST: Can I ask one more question? CHAIR: Very quickly because we've also got of others. Ms MILLER-FROST: I will be very quick. Mr Ryan, when we had the conversation about potentially cutting numbers it sounded to me like you were saying that, actually, there is still a shortage now, and that, in fact, more workers would mean growth in the industry. Are we being contained by a lack of workforce? Could all of your industries, in fact, grow and prosper more if you had more workers available? Mr Ryan : Yes, absolutely. There's the size of the workforce and our ability to grow with that workforce. The other part of the problem is just the efficiency of how the visa programs are managed. If a business has to wait 12 months, without transparency on the status of a visa, where it's at or what the blockage is, that business can't invest in building a factory or taking orders from customers. You're really stuck in the mud. Meanwhile, you've got all this volatility happening around you. It really restricts how you can operate. It's partly the size of the workforce, but also the ability to respond to market conditions. It's also worth pointing out that this fundamental need for migrant labour is complementary to our ability to employ locals as well. First and foremost, we'll always look to the local workforce as a priority. It's much easier, a lot more sustainable long term and has more surety. But the ability to employ migrant labour also then adds security to those local jobs because it underpins the whole business viability. If a business can't operate efficiently, effectively it has to shut the factory doors. They're not necessarily at odds with each other. The two domestic and migrant labour programs are very much complementary. Mrs Pittard : There's also an interesting statistic for your consideration. Within our emergency animal disease planning and activities, we've also, obviously, had a look at what happens when you end up with significant shortages or you end up with an abattoir having to shut. For the pork industry, 85 per cent to 87 per cent of our pork is processed at just six large export accredited abattoirs around Australia. We've done a significant amount of work and can very confidently say that, if those abattoirs have a workforce shortage or some other shortage that requires them to shut down for a day, for any day that an abattoir is shut down, that is a four-day recovery period. You can imagine that if an abattoir has a significant workforce shortage or workers can't get into work or they get sick, you end up with shorter shifts. One day down is four days recovery. For the pork industry that means that within four days with a 16-day recovery, you actually can't catch up again. That ability to confidently plan and have contingency plans in place to maintain that supply chain flow is really critically important. It is very difficult at the minute with the significant shortfall of workers not just across the farming sector but also the transport sector and into the abattoir and processing sector. CHAIR: Mr Caldwell has the floor. Mr CALDWELL: I might be grossly oversimplifying this, but there have been 1.4 million people come into this country, in terms of an increase, through net overseas migration. I find it extraordinary that we're sitting here and every single one of you is using the terms 'need', 'shortfall', 'shortages' et cetera. The system is clearly not working to its optimal level. I've got a couple of questions. One question picks up on a point you made, Tim, about local skilled labour. This is to all of you: is the government doing enough to actually drive skilled labour from the Australian workforce, and how could that be improved? My second question will be about what we could do to the migration program. Mr Ryan : On the domestic front, it's really about skills and people. Certainly, on the skills side, we have seen an overall reduction in funding for training, so that's impacting some of it. But the broader trend, I suppose, of moving to more metro areas and the regions being less populated does mean that there are certainly overall shortages. In particular the growth of other sectors, such as mining in some parts of the country, does draw people away from what would've traditionally been a meat processing career. So, certainly, we've got competition challenges from other parts of the economy. In particular, over recent years, with unemployment being so low—since COVID really—we have faced overall shortages. On top of that, we've had the additional impact of reduced skills and training funding from government. Mr Pyers : I want to take up that point. It's certainly skills and training that are important, in particular, in developing the workforce in regional areas. For example, at the National Farmers' Federation, we're developing an agricultural trade apprenticeship scheme, which we hope to have finalised in 18 months or so. If we can bring that into enough TAFEs and enough regions right around the country, that may give us a bit of an uptick from the skills point of view. But, for me, you've also got to look at local skills. It's not just within the industry. It's not just on farms. Regional towns need cafes. They need offices. It's the Keynesian multiplier effect. We need to look at the skills and what skills are required in various towns and regions from that point of view as well. Mr Pope : I might add there that I think having the right people with the right skills at the right time is very important. But one of the aspects that we find a little bit frustrating is the Skilling Australians Fund. So, when you bring in a worker, you are paying a certain amount of money depending on the length of time you're sponsoring them for. Three years, generally, is about $14,000. That money goes into Skilling Australians Fund, which is to assist with the development of skills of locals. For us, as dairy, we don't actually see any programs or any dairy-specific training that is provided through that money. We have no oversight, or there's no transparency, of how much we're paying as an industry and then how much we're actually getting out of that towards local training. This is quite frustrating for us. Also, if we bring in someone and then that person moves to another company, that receiving company also pays that SAF levy on top of what's already been paid. So there's almost double dipping, yet we still don't see the benefits that are coming out of that program. To answer your question, we would certainly love to see more of our local workers being trained and being brought through the system to increase the industry production and longevity. But we need to actually have these parts clear and transparent, and then we need those pathways to be able to employ these people. Mrs Lawrence : To add to Nathan's point, we also have the same duty of care to our employees in terms of safety and training. We can't just bring people in from overseas and not provide them with equal opportunities to be safe on farm, to understand their job and to increase their skills. Mr Pope : And that comes out of the farmer's pocket. If the SAF levy is available and we're actually paying it, we'd love to see it potentially go towards some more of this training, dairy specific, so we can actually have locals and so we can make sure that we cover off on what's required on farm for those workers that we get in from the international areas. Mrs Pittard : One of the recommendations that Australian Pork made in our submission was about the SAF, very much feeling that it should be invested or that the proportion being paid by the agricultural sector should be hypothecated and spent on the programs and training that are required to really upskill and support initiatives within the agricultural sectors, because there is a significant amount of money, and it is not really utilised in a way that is transparent, and there's no opportunity for the agricultural sectors that are contributing to the fund to actually participate in monitoring—or any evaluation of—the effectiveness of how that funding is being used. Thank you. Mr Ryan : I completely agree. Mr CALDWELL: So one of the takeaways from all of that discussion would be decoupling the SAF from being a funding source—into free TAFE, for example—and hypothecating it to be more industry specific and to directly benefit training. Would that be a good takeaway recommendation from this? Mr Pope : A hundred per cent. Mrs Pittard : Yes. One of the things, as well—the committee is probably getting the feel that there's no 'one size fits all' for agriculture. There's significant diversity across the many commodities and the many industries. One of the things that we are noting is that there is a significantly increased requirement for industries to be investing in training that is specific to their industry. Within Australia Pork, obviously we're lucky. We are a research and development corporation as well as the peak industry body for the pork industry. We are utilising levy funds to develop online training—face-to-face 'train the trainer' programs and others—in really important areas. However, that SAF funding could make a significant contribution to supporting the agricultural sector to have the much-needed upskilling and training opportunities specific to agriculture. CHAIR: Thank you. My question follows on from Mr Caldwell's a bit. In terms of transferable agriculture skills internationally—talking about agricultural workers that have skills—does Australia adequately recognise those overseas skills, qualifications and competencies for your industries? If there are shortfalls there, is there something that, perhaps, we can do to meet those shortfalls? When people are coming from overseas and are fairly highly skilled, but the recognition to allow them to work in that particular skill, at that particular rate and with all the other conditions that come with that skill—the shortfalls in that area for those overseas skilled migrants. Mrs Pittard : We have actually been doing quite a significant piece of work around stock person competency and the skill shortage within our industry. Certainly, we are hearing a lot that there is not an adequate recognition of some of the skills, particularly for people who've undertaken courses at a higher level in the veterinary sciences and animal husbandry spaces. There are still significant requirements for them to come in, both through state regulations, and we do love that—sorry, I shouldn't use sarcastic language! There's a significant lack of harmonisation of the expectations around people meeting skills requirements in each state. So you can find that people who've come in with a veterinary degree are still expected to go and do Certificate III-level training in order to be a recognised stock person within Australia, or have to demonstrate that they've worked for a business for a year, for example. So having opportunities to recognise those skillsets—we are also finding, in the emissions reduction space, that there's only one qualified technician within Australia who's able to operate the machinery and the technology required to have the covered biogas extraction lagoons within our manure management system. We have a significant number of farms who are putting quite considerable capital investment into covering their manure pond or lagoons. That allows the extraction of biogas that can then be used to produce electricity and other significant benefits, but actually bringing in people with the engineering and technical skills to support those systems is very difficult. CHAIR: Thank you. Would anyone else like to add to that? Mr Pope? Mr Pope : I might take it a little bit further. In terms of skills recognition, we're trying to work through the process to actually bring very highly skilled leaders from, as I said, Denmark, the Netherlands and Canada into the country at the moment because they see an opportunity with us to bring their families, bring their skill set, buy a farm, operate the farm and contribute like a normal family farm. The investment's not going overseas. They want to relocate and do that, but the visa pathway for them to be able to do that and actually have reassurance that, when they buy the farm, the visa's not going to get suspended within three years and they won't have to go back. They need that reassurance. We've got families that are leaders. One of the organic dairy farming leaders in Denmark wanted to come here, but the difficulty is that we don't have an investment visa and the baseline to be recognised for the innovation visa that is available is so high that there is this gap. We're going through a situation at the moment where the only way to have these people come in is that they buy a property and put in a manager and that manager then sponsors them for three years to get a residency visa for them to work on their own farm and have their family and children run and operate it like a normal family farm. You can imagine that it's very frustrating for us. Unfortunately, those farmers are now looking at Lithuania or New Zealand. We're potentially losing this knowledge, this capacity and these new skills coming in because of an inflexible system. We've had discussions with Home Affairs—and we've written to the minister as well—trying to highlight that this is a bit of a gap. We've got an opportunity to grow the industry and bring these people in with their experience and innovation. It's a gap that we need to try and address. CHAIR: Point taken on that issue. In terms of the investment visa, are you saying that the benchmarks are too high for it? There are existing visas that you can apply for when you're buying a business in Australia and you want to operate it, but I take it that the benchmarks are the difficulty. Mr Pope : The investment visa no longer exists. We've got people that want to come in. In Victoria, there are a lot of farms up for sale. They're looking at these areas. That visa and the sponsorship by state government don't exist anymore, so we're having to look at a residential visa. CHAIR: We do have business visas. Mr Pope : We do have business visas, but it's different to coming in and being given the recognition and the safety of residency. A lot of that is determined by working for three years with a business to get a residency visa. We've got families that are in retirement age, but they want to invest for their children and bring their families across. That's a bit different to an investment where you're putting in a million dollars, and not as an owner operator. CHAIR: That takes me to another question on your views on this. The EU has a type of visa called a golden visa, where, if you invest—each country's got different investment figures; it could be a $1 million or $2 million—you go through a stringent process but you automatically get your visa. Would something like that help in the agricultural industry when people do want to come over, run a business and continue producing things that we need, that we export and that bring value to Australia? Mr Pope : Absolutely. I think there is a risk there, and I do believe that that has been trialled before. There is a risk there for that being abused, so it would need to be very pointed in the requirements and what it's targeted at, particularly for investors, say, as Tim mentioned, ensuring that there's some surety around coming in, investing, the timeframes involved et cetera. There would be definite demand there if it could be linked to ensuring that the industry itself is increasing its productivity, development and production. Mrs Lawrence : I wanted to come in in support of Nathan in terms of bringing these families in. I think that, as an industry, we totally undervalue the pathway from entry level through to management level and ownership, equity partnership or however that forms in two ways. One is that, on-farm, the value of the skill of cupping up a cow is completely undervalued. If we get that wrong, we impact animal welfare, and we impact the productivity of the farm. There are many things we do when we're cupping up a cow. The second is the skill transfer that those managers or farm owners are able to give to their other employees because they understand the entire system on the farm. As I said earlier, we're a multidisciplined system. We cover HR, we cover animal welfare, we cover science. Essentially, we are a science, technology, engineering and maths operation. The value of those people to training and productivity is undervalued. Mr Pope : We have statistics that say a family farm generally spends 75 per cent of their revenue within a hundred kilometres of that farm. The benefit to the community, and, obviously, the flow-on effects—there's child-minding, there's schooling, there's nursing—actually goes to help those regions and strengthens the economy within those areas. Mr Ryan : To add to the previous comments, if you go to a modern abattoir, like the one you visited recently, there's a high level of sophistication, engineering and technology in those establishments. You see that industry back here, particularly AMPC, investing a lot in STEM and attracting local talent, building that talent and getting them into our workforce. The specialisation of some of this technology requires us to compete and access the global talent pool. We do need to make sure, particularly for these really specialised skills like the one Tanya had an example of before, that we can have a vehicle to bring them into the country and get them in the industry back here. We are investing in the domestic workforce, but some of these really specialised capabilities require us to get out of Europe, North America or wherever that person might come from. CHAIR: I'll now go to Mr Rebello, who has a question. Mr REBELLO: My question—hopefully a very quick one—is building on Mr Caldwell's discussion about the SAF levy. Can you think of any examples or have you seen an example of the SAF levy funding coming back to the agricultural sector? Mrs Pittard : There's very little transparency. I suppose that, at best, we could say maybe indirectly through people in regional communities being able to undertake courses in some of the trade spaces that benefit farms. We know that many farms now employ electricians for a number of days a week, simply because of the complexity of their sensor systems and the other systems that they're running. Pigs, particularly sows, require a quite consistent temperatures, so you need to have all those temperature monitoring systems, fan systems and others. Probably there would be indirect benefit to the agricultural sectors through SAF, but there's not a lot of data or transparency relating to how many apprentices within rural or regional areas are accessing the free TAFE and then continuing to work within their local communities. Mr REBELLO: Everyone else was shaking their heads, but is there anything else that anyone would like to add? Mr Ryan : I think generally it'd be great to have more transparency about where this money ends up and ideally align it back to the industry which contributed. Mr Pope : A hundred per cent. CHAIR: Mr Calwell. Mr CALDWELL: As we close, I just want to say thank you, because you've been extremely informative this morning. It's been a fantastic roundtable. One of the things that I found, which I just commented to Mr Rebello, was that there's been a really high level of discussion around the skilled workforce that's required in your sectors. I probably didn't have a full appreciation of that. I think, broadly speaking, people see some of the agricultural sector and the food production sector as being predominantly unskilled. That's been really enlightening for me, so thank you for providing that information. It's quite obvious to me that, in relation to the migration system, we've been saying that the numbers are too high and the standards are too low. But I think it's probably fair to asses that they're also not landing where they need to land. Do you agree with that third part of my assessment, and is there anything that you think we could do in terms of project-specific or region-specific visa settings to improve the workforce stability for your sector? Mrs Pittard : Certainly from pork, and I'm sure that the other sectors would agree. We're very keen to collaborate and provide information and data into some of that departmental information-gathering and the different data sets they're using to set some of the levels and the needs. We find it quite difficult to get information about our industries into those processes to allow for that differentiation between the skill sets required. There's a significant contribution that the agricultural sector can make to help inform some of those overarching policy documents that then inform some of these decisions. Often we get a chance to be consulted when it's further down the track. But what we're probably a little bit concerned about is: how do we have a better opportunity to provide information into those initial landscape-setting and assumption-setting processes? Mr Pyers : I think from one point of view, Mr Calwell, you hit the nail on the head insofar as you said that, whatever happens with the numbers, they're not landing in the right spot; we're not getting the result that we need. And I would agree with the previous speakers, particularly from Australian Pork, saying we need to participate— Mr CALDWELL: Can I just interrupt for a moment. Can I ask Mr McGoverne to turn off his microphone. That's better. Mr Pyers : As I was saying, it's obvious that the numbers aren't landing where they need to be, because we still have a problem. At the end of the day, we still have a skills shortage. We still have fruit to get off the vine, animals to harvest and so forth and so on. I think anything that we can do to work together maybe on targeted programs, specific training or whatever it needs to be must be a worthwhile thing. Mr Ryan : I'll add to that, if I may, two things. There's the overall quantum. Certainly, our industry is always changing. We go through peaks and troughs largely driven by seasonal conditions and on-farm conditions that we need to respond to. For me, it's as much about the ability to respond in a timely and efficient manner as it is about the overall quantum of the workforce. Yes, there are shortages, but I think the pressing issue for us at the moment is the inability to respond to a fast-changing world like this. The global environment is so challenging to navigate at the moment, yet our settings and the ability to expand our workforce really hold us back. It's the settings—from a policy setting to the administration of any visa programs—that are really a concern for us. In terms of targeted visas, yes, the regions need people, but our metro workforce and employers are also feeling the same pressures. It's not just a regional issue. Anyone operating an abattoir or a small goods factory in one of the cities is also facing the same workforce and skills shortages. CHAIR: I'll ask one question of each industry in the last few minutes that we have. We're obviously looking at skilled migration and how we can better the system. We'll be coming up with recommendations, which will then go to the minister. Those recommendations are then taken on board, developed into policy and whatever. If you had a magic wand and there was one recommendation you'd really like to see in our report and in our recommendations to the minister, what would it be? I might kick off with Mr Pyers. Mr Pyers : That is an exceptionally good question. For me the magic wand must be more people—the right people—in the right place at the right time. It must be that. It can't be anything else. CHAIR: I'll now go to the Australian pork industry. Mrs Pittard : I think it's about ensuring that agriculture and its post farm operations are really given the highest priority within the visa system, allowing us to have programs that specifically target the areas where we have shortages and letting us work with you to inform you where those shortages really are so that it's based on real-world, actual data, rather than on assumptions that are created outside our industries. CHAIR: And in real time, I take it. Mrs Pittard : Yes, please. CHAIR: We now go to Australian Dairy Farmers. I'm sorry for putting you on the spot. Mr Pope : That's alright. I think the committee's actually hit it on the head. It's about looking at the SAF levy, making sure that there's transparency and bringing funding back into training for our particular industries. Also, Chair, you hit it with the investment visa. Again, it's bringing the right people in so that we can have that transfer of skills and the ability to actually ensure, and give them some surety, around being involved in our industry. I'm sure Michele will add to this from a farmer's perspective as well. Mrs Lawrence : I was going to say that this is fundamentally about sustaining food production. Our goal would be a stable, skilled, sustainable workforce from entry level through. It needs to be a simple process where we can access the workers when we need them. Waiting seven months or longer for someone to come in is incredibly taxing. CHAIR: So the recommendation would be to shorten the timeframe you're waiting for someone to come in. Mrs Lawrence : Or just make sure we've got the pathways for people to be there earlier so that they're in there at the right place. I guess the loss of senior dairy cattle farm workers was huge for us. That way, we've got the pathway for people to come up into the higher level roles. CHAIR: Mr Ryan, from the Australian Meat Industry Council, what would your recommendation be? Mr Ryan : It's hard to pick one, but if I had to it would be how visas are processed—so times and transparency—and how it really stymies business planning. Particularly if government wants to promote productivity, it would be an absolute game changer for our industry if we could plan with surety to make investments and business decisions going forward, if we knew the visa system was efficient in accommodating that. But, alongside that, it's getting the policy settings around those visas right which is really important. CHAIR: That brings us to the end of this session. Thank you all for participating today. It was a great session, hearing firsthand about your trials and tribulations in the skilled migration area. It's given us a better idea of the agriculture industry and farmers et cetera. Certainly your views and the submissions will be taken seriously. Thank you for those recommendations at the end. We can discuss them when we're coming up with recommendations for the minister. Could I also thank you for appearing today, as I said, as well as for everything you do for our nation. Australia's is one of the best economic stories in terms of where we are, and that's due to our agriculture industry, which has benefited this nation for many years and will continue to do so. My personal view has always been that yes, we look at a whole range of other things, but agriculture has always been there and will be there and will benefit this nation. So thank you for everything you do for us. It's appreciated by us. Even city folk like me understand that putting food on the table and exporting as we do wouldn't happen and that economic growth wouldn't be there without you guys. So thank you. Thank you for coming today. You'll be sent a transcript of your evidence and you'll have an opportunity to request any corrections if you feel that there are transcription errors. If you've been asked to provide any additional information, the secretariat will be in touch with a due date after the transcript is available. If there's anything else you want to forward to us, please feel free to do so. We may call upon you again at some stage, individually or as a group, towards the end of the inquiry itself. Once again, thank you for appearing before us. Proceedings suspended from 10:16 to 10:30 .