STATEMENTS BY SENATORS

Senator BROCKMAN (Western Australia—Deputy President and Chair of Committees) (13:36): I have risen in this place before to speak on the importance of working holiday-makers to regional communities, and I will continue to rise and talk about this issue for as long as this Labor government wants to use working holiday-maker visas as a football to try and cover up its failed immigration system.

The fact is working holiday-makers are vital to regional communities, filling one in seven farm jobs nationally and 44 per cent in horticulture during peak harvest. In my home state of Western Australia, harvest in the grain industry could start as soon as a couple of weeks away. It will go through to Christmas.

A large number of those who will work on farms to harvest that grain to feed not just Australia but the world will be working holiday-makers, or they would have been last year. At the moment Labor's pause on working holiday-maker visa processing is leaving literally hundreds of farmers in doubt as to where the labour for their harvest will come from. These are not people who permanently migrate to Australia.

They are your prototypical backpackers. Ninety-five per cent plus of people on working holiday-maker visas end up going back home to their country of origin. The five per cent who don't return change their visas.

They are not part of the migration problem, but Labor are using them as a football for their own failed migration policy.