WHAT is now the federal division of Nicholls in central, northern Victoria was built on a circular economy.
For more than a century, thousands of new migrants travelled to the horticulture and dairy stronghold to replace the generations of migrants who had arrived before and were moving up in the world, having squirrelled away enough money to buy their own farms.
The new arrivals would often walk not just in the footsteps, but straight into the lives, of their predecessors and recycle, repair, buy, refurbish, lease, share and reuse their jobs, blankets, crockery, furniture, homes and even bicycles and clothes.
A few years down the track and they would themselves graduate from farm hand to landholder after saving enough for an entry-level farm somewhere in the Goulburn Valley.
"These new landholders would then employ people from other parts of the world who work hard, get enough money and then buy their own farms," Nationals MP Sam Birrell told parliament.
And so it goes.
Mr Birrell said it is "one of the most incredible success stories in Australia."
"It leads to Australians having a better situation in terms of the cost of living. We grow our produce here. We grow it efficiently, and we have generally had high productivity in the agricultural sector," he said.
"That means that, when you walk into the supermarket, you can find a cauliflower, a kilo of apples or a lettuce for a reasonable price."
But that world has changed since the local lad grew up on a section between Toolamba and Murchison, and the demographics have shifted.
He said the biggest issue currently facing the local farming and processing industries, and therefore the wider community that relies on both for survival, is a lack of available workers.
"It needs to be fixed by bringing in overseas workers to contribute to Australian agriculture and a pathway to permanency," he said.
Mr Birrell, an agronomist by trade, made the observation in a private members motion recently based on comments by Jobs and Skills Australia acting commissioner David Turvey the previous week that overseas agricultural labourers could be included under a new visa for lower-paid employees to fill workforce deficits.
Mr Turvey also said that the agriculture sector was in contention for the lowest-tier visa, announced after the government's review of the migration system.
Mr Birrell used the motion to "condemn" the government for scrapping the previous Coalition government's agriculture visa and "failing" to address labour shortfalls of a predicted shortage of a then 172,000 workers offered up by the Food Supply Chain Alliance in August 2022, although the government disputes the accuracy of this figure and industry has been unable to provide a breakdown.
He also seized on Mr Turvey's words to call on the current government to introduce its own Ag Visa.
Labor scrapped the former government's Ag Visa, which had been open to a suite of ASEAN nations and had the backing of the industry, after the 2022 election and instead doubled down on the Pacific Australia Labour Mobility program, as much for wider regional security considerations as for the pool of low- and unskilled labourers.
However, while the government delivered thousands of new PALM workers in rapid time after taking office, the numbers have since steadied while still short of requirements for an agriculture sector traditionally over-reliant on seasonal migrant workers.
Cracks in Labor's plans deepened in the last half of 2023 when some of the highest-contributing participating Oceania nations said they were considering a cap on worker contributions so the flow to Australia did not create their own domestic shortages.
The situation is compounded by rule changes meaning UK and potentially backpackers from other countries will no longer be required to work on farms to get working holidaymaker visas renewed.
Those factors, along with recent IR legislation and PALM scheme changes, are "making it impossible for business productivity."
It also curbs the regional development that once came with permanent residency for migrants.
The PALM scheme is a temporary system with short-term visa's running to nine months and longer visa's of one- to four-years. An inducement for Pacific governments to send workers to Australia was that participants are encouraged to send earnings home.
These things mean, of course, that the workers know they are not working towards the Australian dream of business or home ownership, and that there is reduced local economic stimulation generally but, perhaps more worrisome, reduced permanent populations translates into less government funding for things like infrastructure and health care.
Peak grower group Ausveg reported last August that 30 per cent of vegetable growers were considering leaving the industry within the following 12 months, while 72 per cent were experiencing workforce shortages at the time.
It also recently repeated calls for an alternative 'harvest visa' to partner, with countries beyond the Pacific to cover seasonal shortages, introduced.
Mr Birrell said his motion was an effort "to implore Labor to get on with replacing the Ag Visa with something."
"I'm so disappointed that Labor haven't managed to address this worker shortage crisis in agriculture in the time they've been in government," he told parliament.
"Labor scrapped the ag visa but have come up with nothing to replace it. The dairy industry is struggling. The horticultural industry is struggling. All agricultural industries are struggling.
"As I said, if you don't want to call it the Ag Visa, find something else to call it; I'll support it.
"But just get something in place so our farmers can do what they need to do, which is make sure that people working in the supermarket have got good, clean, affordable produce to ease all the other issues they're facing in the current cost-of-living crisis."
