A disengagement Task Force has been established by the Australian Government to look into cases of workers under the Pacific Australia Labour Mobility (PALM) Scheme absconding or going into hiding.
Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) First Assistant Secretary and head of labour mobility, skills and education in the Pacific Jan Hutton said the task force comprised representatives of several Australian agencies.
“We started to look at the reasons why workers were disengaging from the PALM Scheme. What we found is there were a variety of reasons.
“In some cases they were mistreated, but often it was because of unscrupulous operators feeding them disinformation that there were better opportunities if they disengaged and tried to find employment somewhere else, for example, which was really breaking the conditions of the PALM Scheme.”
Ms Hutton said Fijians had lower levels of disengagement compared with other countries under the scheme.
“In Fiji’s PALM structure, you have 5305 workers in Australia. 89 percent of your workers are in our long-term cohort and only 11 percent are in the short-term cohort.
“What that means for Fiji is you have people that are really investing in skills and they’re coming to Australia to take up those longer-term skills opportunities. I don’t have any evidence to support this anecdotally, I suspect that’s why disengagement for Fiji is somewhat less.”
Ms Hutton said now that they understood the motivations behind the disengagement, they were better able to respond to the issue.
“We have introduced new portability provisions, for example, so where we find a worker is being mistreated or not being treated in accordance with our PALM rules and regulations, we have the ability to help them move to another employer.
“Through these measures, we’ve really seen the disengagement numbers or absconders really drop.
“In 2022-2023, it was around 10 percent of our total PALM workforce. In 2023–2024, it dropped to 5 percent so we’ve managed to halve it and the figures I’m seeing so far this year are substantially less than that.”
