Ex-Aust foreign minister calls for Pacific guest workers
Updated
Australia's previous Foreign Minister, Alexander Downer, says the Rudd Government should give South Pacific Islanders special rights to work in Australia. Mr Downer says he favours a scheme for Islanders to enter Australia, even though this was not the policy of the Howard Government. He says labour mobility should be offered to Pacific Islands in return for their commitment to meet minimum standards of governance.
Presenter: Graeme Dobell
Speaker: Alexander Downer, former Australian foreign minister
ALEXANDER DOWNER: I think they should negotiate cooperation agreements with countries individually, and those agreements and this was all in a Cabinet decision that was made during the course of 2007 by the Howard government and now being carried on by the Rudd Government.
I think the idea of going to these countries and saying look, we will give you a whole series of medium term commitments including funding commitments, aid program commitments, and the Rudd Government may give some commitments as well in terms of labour mobility into Australia, personally I don't have a problem with that, although that wasn't the policy of the Howard government.
But the quid pro quo has got to be that they will need certain minimum standards of governance. And if they don't mean those minimum standards of governance then the deal is off. I do think that's a very good idea.
Now none of those agreements have been negotiated yet so the proof of this isn't in statements that Australia is prepared to negotiate such agreements because we said we'd do that last year. The proof of this is going to be what kind of agreements they do actually negotiate, and there's no reason to believe that they won't be able to negotiate perfectly reasonable agreements.
GRAEME DOBELL: Do you now believe that Australia should offer some special right of labour access to Australia in exchange for those sorts of governance standards commitments from the Pacific?
ALEXANDER DOWNER: Well I think we need to see how the New Zealand experiment is going. There's no reason to believe it can't work, actually. I think it has the potential to work. I'm not sure how popular this will be with the public or with politicians in Australia. But it's something that needs to be examined, I think. And I've always thought that, and I argued that in years gone by.
In the case of a country like Nauru, you've got around 11,000 people there. It has no real long term economic prospects. It has some phosphate left but once that phosphate is gone, the prognosis for Nauru, it's pretty dire.
It doesn't have agriculture, fisheries are not very substantial. What are people going to do? I mean literally, what are they going to do in Nauru to generate income? And I think in time we will have to allow Nauruans some access to the Australian labour market.
And so I think on a case by case basis it's something that we can look at.
GRAEME DOBELL: And moving from Nauru to the other end of the size scale, should Australia be thinking about offering the same access to Papua New Guinea?
ALEXANDER DOWNER: Well I think it's something that the new Government will want to talk to them about. I think it would depend very much on what sort of terms you could negotiate really. I think you wouldn't want to give them carte blanche and say you'll definitely do it.
I think you'd want to see what they would offer, and I certainly think it should be done on a quid pro quo basis. That is that if it's to be done at all, and I qualify it by saying if it's to be done at all, with a large country, I mean that's what - six-million people in Papua New Guinea - if it's to be done with a large country then I think it should be negotiated on a quid pro quo basis.
That is, that it should be tied up with the continual development of the enhanced cooperation program with Papua New Guinea, not just granted to them if you like gratis.
GRAME DOBELL: Would that labour mobility offer be more effective for Australia if it did, as you say, negotiate it bilaterally with each individual Pacific island country, or should it be partly tied into the labour mobility and negotiations of a free trade agreement between Australia, New Zealand and the other countries of the forum?
ALEXANDER DOWNER: No I would do it bilaterally. I think it would be more effective bilaterally. There are different issues for different countries too, different circumstances in relation to different countries. They're not all the same.
And there are questions, you know, about if we were to negotiate labour mobility agreements: how long people would stay for, what sort of work they would do, who would pay for them to come to Australia, what guarantees would there be of their welfare while they were in Australia, and what guarantees would they give or would Australia be able to get about their return to their country of origin.
All of those things would have to be negotiated, and they probably are best negotiated bilaterally rather than on a region-wide basis because the circumstances will differ a little from country to country.
