Farmers dealing with labour shortage calling against new tax on visa holders
Right now, there is no tax payable on the 1st eighteen thousand two hundred dollars ($18,200) the working holiday visa makers are going to earn. However, from the 1st of July of 2016, these visa holders are going to have to pay tax on every dollar they earn. The farmers who state that up to fifty per cent of their seasonal workforce is made up of a lot of these visa holders are making plans to do a major lobby against this planned tax change.
The peak horticulture lobby groups of Queensland, Growcom, Cotton Australia, and the Queensland Farmers Federation are all planning to launch an ‘intensive lobbying campaign’ so that the severe impact of the measures on the agricultural sector can be highlighted, as they fear it can set an exodus of seasonal farm labour.
”It is very simple,” Mr Pat Hannan, the chief executive officer of Growcom, stated at a recent interview with ABC Rural Radio. ”It will deter backpackers from coming and working on our farms.”
Mr Hannan continued on to say, “Without labour to get the crop into the ground and particularly to get the crop out of the ground, our farmers, some of them, are under threat of losing their businesses. It’s really that serious.”
”When you are saying to backpackers, ‘you might have been paid $22.62 an hour before but now we’re only going to pay you $14.59 an hour’, I have got to say that gets around pretty quickly and the backpacker community is going to be less inclined to come to Australia to enjoy their working holidays,” the Growcom CEO said.
Mr Hannan said that this kind of decision is going to hurt farmers and rural communities, which heavily relies on labour provided by backpackers.
”There are a lot of rural communities that survive based on the backpackers and labourers that come into those communities during peak planting and harvest times,” said Mr Hannan. ”It is very short-sighted not to take the dramatic effect on the economies of those areas into account when you make changes the way the Government has.”
He also added that the ones who are affected are the backpackers, as well as the growers and the farmers, which in turn are going to affect the local rural economies.
Source: MigrationAlliance.com.au
The peak horticulture lobby groups of Queensland, Growcom, Cotton Australia, and the Queensland Farmers Federation are all planning to launch an ‘intensive lobbying campaign’ so that the severe impact of the measures on the agricultural sector can be highlighted, as they fear it can set an exodus of seasonal farm labour.
”It is very simple,” Mr Pat Hannan, the chief executive officer of Growcom, stated at a recent interview with ABC Rural Radio. ”It will deter backpackers from coming and working on our farms.”
Mr Hannan continued on to say, “Without labour to get the crop into the ground and particularly to get the crop out of the ground, our farmers, some of them, are under threat of losing their businesses. It’s really that serious.”
”When you are saying to backpackers, ‘you might have been paid $22.62 an hour before but now we’re only going to pay you $14.59 an hour’, I have got to say that gets around pretty quickly and the backpacker community is going to be less inclined to come to Australia to enjoy their working holidays,” the Growcom CEO said.
Mr Hannan said that this kind of decision is going to hurt farmers and rural communities, which heavily relies on labour provided by backpackers.
”There are a lot of rural communities that survive based on the backpackers and labourers that come into those communities during peak planting and harvest times,” said Mr Hannan. ”It is very short-sighted not to take the dramatic effect on the economies of those areas into account when you make changes the way the Government has.”
He also added that the ones who are affected are the backpackers, as well as the growers and the farmers, which in turn are going to affect the local rural economies.
Source: MigrationAlliance.com.au
