At the Pacific Islands Forum in Papua New Guinea this week John Howard is under renewed pressure to allow Pacific Islanders to work in Australia. The topic has long been on the agenda for Island leaders but at past forums Australia has side-stepped the issue. This time it will be harder to dodge, since access to the Australian labour market is a key component of the Pacific Plan - the blueprint on regional integration developed by the forum secretariat for consideration at this year’s leaders’ meeting.

Australia and New Zealand want the forum island countries to speed up the implementation of regional trade agreements that will open their markets to foreign goods and capital. The island states insist that increased labour mobility is integral to these trade deals. This is not just a negotiating tactic. Remittances from overseas workers are already a crucial source of revenue for many island states (for example Fiji earns more from remittances than from either sugar or garment exports). Under a more liberal trade and investment regime the importance of remittances will grow: island governments hope offshore employment can replace jobs shed by industries that are currently subsidised or protected, and that workers’ remittances will help to compensate for revenue lost as import tariffs are removed.

Without increased remittance income, the island states’ trade deficits will balloon from their already high levels, increasing their dependence on Australian aid. Shadow Pacific Affairs spokesman Bob Sercombe has recognised this link - labour mobility is an integral (if rather vague) component of his recent policy proposal for a ‘Pacific Community’, which helps to explain why it was so warmly endorsed by many Pacific leaders.

There are other pressures on Australian to start thinking seriously about this issue. The combination of youth bulge (40 per cent of Pacific Islanders are under 20 years of age) and a lack of jobs is a volatile mix. Even if trade liberalisation eventually produces the economic nirvana in the Pacific that free market economists predict (which we doubt), there will be a lag before new jobs become available. Meanwhile, on the domestic front, Australia has labour shortages that could be eased by employing Pacific Islanders, most notably in horticulture.

The shortage of seasonal workers was highlighted in the National Farmers’ Federation Rural Labour Action Plan released last month. The NFF rightly argues that more must be done to increase domestic participation in the agricultural labour market. One obvious measure is better accommodation and transport options for seasonal workers. The NFF also recognises that much more could be done to encourage Indigenous workers into the horticultural industry (as demonstrated in a successful scheme supported by Noel Pearson’s Cape York Partnerships).

But the NFF has also cautiously opened the door to a new visa for offshore workers in agriculture. The NFF is not proposing a guest worker scheme on the German model, where workers are separated from home and family for years at a time. The proposal is for a seasonal workers scheme to cover temporary gaps in the rural labour market at peak periods (like harvests). It stresses that overseas workers should be limited to industries and regions where there is evidence of a labour shortage, that they must be employed at local wages and conditions, that the program must contain an element of training and that the workers should come from countries that receive Australia aid dollars.

These are sensible starting points. Another crucial element of any such scheme is that overseas workers should go home at the end of the season with the expectation of returning to Australia the following year. Canada’s long-running seasonal agricultural workers program shows that the promise of future employment dramatically reduces the risk of overstaying: foreign workers have little incentive to disappear into the community if they know a job awaits them next season. Facilitating the annual rotation of workers to and from Australia in this way has other advantages. It enables growers to retain the skills acquired by their offshore labour force. It encourages workers to repatriate money and skills gained in Australia and to invest them in enterprises at home. And it ameliorates the social costs of labour migration by limiting the separation of workers from their families and communities.

The Australian government is considering recruiting Pacific Islanders to bolster troop numbers in an overstretched defence force, our rugby teams are stronger for the inclusion of the Pacific’s best players and we are busily importing Pacific doctors and nurses to staff our hospitals with little regard for the impact this brain drain may have on island nations. It’s time to look at creating job opportunities for those lower skilled workers left behind.