By Mark Zirnsak
Uniting Church congregations and members across our Synod continue to provide pastoral and material support to people working on the Pacific Australia Labour Mobility (PALM) scheme. People on the PALM scheme are from the Pacific Islands and Timor Leste and work in Australia for up to four years, sending money home to their families and communities. Key industries they work in include horticulture, meat processing and aged care.
A reasonable question that church members raise is whether the scheme really benefits the workers and their communities.
In December 2025, the World Bank and the Australian National University Development Policy Centre released the findings of face-to-face interviews with 200 workers and 15 employers on the PALM scheme and the New Zealand Recognised Seasonal Employer scheme. The workers were from Vanuatu, Tonga, Samoa, Fiji, Papua New Guinea and Timor Leste. The survey team also met with village chiefs, church leaders and more than 200 families in the countries the workers came from.
Workers reported earning several times more than they could in their home country. The remittances they have sent home have paid for houses, school fees, solar panels, water tanks, satellite internet connections, vehicles and household goods. The remittances have provided investments in land and small businesses such as taxi and car rental services, shops, commercial agriculture and catering ventures. In Fiji, Tonga and Vanuatu, the researchers met with returned workers who were funding church renovations and supporting village projects. In Fiji, remittances had been pooled to purchase a school bus for 200 children from six villages. A Ni-Vanuatu community member put it simply: “Earning in Vanuatu is only for meals; if we want to build a house, labour mobility is the only way.”
A small minority of workers reported poor workplace and living conditions, with changes to the PALM scheme regulation having improved workers’ conditions.
The researchers reported that the employers interviewed showed a genuine concern for their Pacific Island workforce and a willingness to invest in workers’ wellbeing. Many of the employers had undertaken in-country recruitment themselves, building long-term relationships with workers’ households and communities. Some have offered services and support beyond the schemes’ requirements, including investments in dedicated health clinics, gyms, sporting facilities and places of worship to support workers’ health and welfare while in Australia and New Zealand.
However, it was not all good news. The researchers heard that the PALM scheme results in a loss of productive working-age men and women for agricultural production, communal activities, and recovery efforts following natural disasters in the countries they come from. Recent estimates suggest that temporary labour mobility accounts for 15 per cent of the working-age population in Tonga being overseas, 11 per cent in Vanuatu and 2 per cent in Fiji.
The research was more representative than several recent reports. The World Bank study surveyed a sample of workers, rather than relying on self-selection, which usually results in those who have had a bad experience coming forward.
The research contrasts with media reporting about the PALM scheme. Stories about workers from the Pacific Islands doing well are not usually seen as news in mainstream media.
That is not to say there are not cases of exploitation on the PALM scheme, but they tend to be rare, as the Commonwealth Government has significantly increased safeguards for workers on the scheme. As an example of such safeguards working, somewhat slowly, the Justice and International Mission (JIM) Cluster had made several reports to the Commonwealth Department of Employment and Workplace Relations against Bulmer Farms located in Lindenow, East Gippsland. For example, a PALM scheme worker reported to the JIM Cluster that she had been forced to work unpaid overtime on the farm.
On December 17 last year, the Fair Work Ombudsman announced it had commenced legal action against the farm for allegedly underpaying 28 PALM scheme workers more than $645,000. It is alleged that 40 per cent of the underpayment is related to unpaid overtime hours. The range of alleged underpayment for individual workers ranged from $1500 to more than $39,000. The alleged underpayments occurred between December 2019 and December 2023.
Mark Zirnsak is the Synod’s Senior Social Justice Advocate