When I arranged to visit Mossmont Nurseries outside Griffith in the NSW Riverina, I pictured something like an expanded Bunnings garden centre. The reality is starkly different. In the words of Jonathan Moss, it’s “a tree factory.”
Moss is a sixth-generation owner of a family business that’s been around for 170 years. It grows up to a million bare-rooted trees annually — almonds, peaches, nectarines, plums, apricots and citrus — and sells them to orchards all over Australia. “We’re the beginning of the horticultural industry,” he says.
I visit in winter, the busiest season for despatching trees to growers. In the fields, teams of workers in hi-vis clothing trail behind chugging tractors. An angled blade carves through the red earth, upending long rows of closely grown saplings. A first set of workers shakes clods of soil from the roots, the next crew bundles them together, and then they are heaved onto trailers and carted off to the packing shed.
At peak times, Mossmont needs between ninety and a hundred staff. About two-thirds of them are employed under the federal government’s PALM scheme, which enables people from nine Pacific countries and East Timor to work in Australia on temporary visas. Government data shows that in November 2025, 32,365 PALM workers were engaged by 530 approved employers around Australia. More than half worked in agriculture, more than a third in meat processing and the rest in aged care, tourism and other industries.
PALM — the Pacific Australia Labour Mobility scheme — has two streams. The workers at Mossmont have come to Griffith under the short-term stream, established in 2012, which offers a nine-month visa. It is designed to fill seasonal gaps for fruit-pickers, vegetable harvesters and other workers in short supply. Workers may return for repeat seasons but must spend at least three months every year in their home country.
The long-term stream allows for a four-year stay. It began in 2018 as part of Australia’s “step up” to improve diplomatic relations in the Pacific and was intended to fill regional jobs in healthcare, social assistance and hospitality. By November last year the meat industry had emerged as the major employer, with more than 11,000 PALM workers accounting for two-thirds of all long-term visa holders. By some calculations, PALM workers now make up around a quarter of the industry’s labour force.
According to Pacific Island affairs minister Pat Conroy, the PALM scheme is “the ultimate win–win.”
The first win is that workers get jobs at far higher wages than they could ever hope to earn at home. On average, individual PALM workers send home $1500 per month, or a combined total of $450 million in 2024–25. These remittances make a significant contribution to national economies, boost household budgets, pay for children to go to school and young adults to undertake training, fund the construction of houses to withstand hurricanes, and finance shops and other small enterprises.
The second win is that PALM workers fill stubborn labour market gaps in industries and regions when many Australians are reluctant to work for the wages on offer.
Jonathan Moss loves the PALM scheme for both reasons. Before PALM, Mossmont Nurseries relied on working holiday-makers to meet seasonal needs. And while Moss still uses backpackers to fill some gaps, he says their motivations are different. “They’re here to make the days within their scheme,” he says, referring to the eighty-eight days backpackers must work to secure a second twelve-month visa. After completing that time, he says, few return.
“I don’t blame them,” adds Moss. “They want to go to the beach rather than cold old Griffith.”
Moss has often trained backpackers only to have them decide they don’t like the work and quit. But since PALM workers are determined to transform the lives of their families, he says, they bring a much stronger work ethic.
Moss calculates that if he had to revert to only using backpackers, he’d need to boost Mossmont’s staff by a third to maintain the same production. This is consistent with research by the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Sciences, which compared the output of Pacific seasonal workers and working holiday makers over a three-year period. It found that seasonal workers, on average, were 20 per cent more productive.
“Once you have a skilled PALM worker, they will then train the next lot of skilled PALM workers,” Moss says. “I have my staff that have been with me now for eight years, they’ve moved on to being in control of things like irrigation, or supervising roles. And they’re the ones training up the next lot of PALM workers coming through.”
Moss has visited PALM workers in their homes and seen how wages from Mossmont can transform lives. He shows me photos of a new two-storey house in Timor-Leste, painted aqua blue and brick red, with deep tiled verandas. It’s humbling to see such achievements, he says, and makes him proud to be a PALM scheme employer.
Stanley Tamanoah from Tanna Island in Vanuatu is on his third placement at Mossmont Nurseries. Peter Mares
He describes the PALM scheme as “pure aid.” Rather than development dollars being depleted by administration costs and intermediaries, the money goes straight to the people who use it to benefit their families and communities.
Moss’s employees are enthusiastic too. In the field, I chat with Stanley Tamanoah, a father of two from Vanuatu. Tall and softly spoken, he’s wearing a black hoodie under a bright orange jacket. He is on his third rotation at Mossmont.
Tamanoah’s father died when he was young, and he and his four siblings were raised by their mother. At home, on Tanna island, he tended the family gardens and did odd jobs, but had no regular income. Here at Mossmont he can take home as much as $20,000 after nine months work. After the last season, he bought a Landcruiser that his nephew uses to provide taxi services, and he’s also building a house.
“We changed our village back home,” he says. “We miss our family, but we have to sacrifice for a better living.”
Two hours’ drive south of Griffith is Finley, population 1864, according to the sign on the highway. Kylie Titlow is operations manager at Finely Regional Care, a local not-for-profit that runs a seventy-seven-bed residential aged-care facility, a retirement village, two medical centres and a preschool, and delivers care at home to residents within an eighty kilometres radius. When Titlow joined in 2019, the service was suffering from a dire workforce shortage and struggling to find skilled staff.
In 2020 she helped Finley Regional Care recruit four carers from Kiribati. Siera, who asked that I only use her first name, was part of that first cohort and landed in Melbourne with just one cardigan.
“And oh, it was freezing!” she says.
I ask if she arrived in mid-winter. “No,” she replies with a huge burst of laughter. “It was in March!”
After five years in the Riverina, the cold is one thing Siera is still not used to. It’s a sunny day outside, and we’re sitting in a heated office that feels almost tropical. But while Siera found the weather chilly, the welcome in Finley was warm, even though Covid-19 locked everyone down almost as soon as she arrived.
“We didn’t even get a chance to go buy warmer clothes” says Siera. After she admitted to one her new colleagues that she was wrapping herself in a blanket to walk to work, a bundle of warm clothes was dropped off at her house. “And then everyone at work heard about it, and they start bringing all their clothes to us, and now we’ve got a lot of clothes to wear. Heaps of them!”
“She’s my rock”: Finley Regional Care operations Manager Kylie Titlow with I-Kiribati nurse Siera. Peter Mares
Titlow says it was a big change to employ Pacific workers in Finley, where there was previously “no multiculturalism.” There were some initial misunderstandings, though she and Siera laugh about them now. Although she and her I-Kiribati colleagues eat lots of rice, for instance, they didn’t expect it to be served as dessert. “We thought that was really, really funny, when they had a rice pudding one night and it got slopped on the plate with the savoury meal,” laughs Titlow.
As operations manager, though, she felt bad for not giving the new staff a better induction. When the next group came onboard, she was more thorough, even including a lesson on setting the table with knives and forks, since people in Kiribati generally eat with spoons or their hands. Siera’s experience greatly benefited subsequent groups of carers arriving from Kiribati.
“I already informed them about what to bring and what they need here,” she says.
“She’s my rock,” chimes in Titlow. “I use her to settle everybody in.”
For Siera, the only downsides of the PALM scheme have been homesickness and culture shock. “It’s a good program, you get benefit from it,” she says, “and even your family have benefit from it.”
Siera sends money home to support her retired parents, who rely on a small pension. “Oh, they love me when it’s payday week!” she laughs. “And I’m like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I’ll send you money, just go take it off from the ATM.”
It would be hard to keep Finley Regional Care running without PALM scheme staff, says Titlow. She cautions that using the scheme involves a significant financial commitment and a lot of administration to satisfy the requirements of being an approved employer but says it’s worth it in the end.
Mossmont Nurseries and Finley Regional Care show how the PALM scheme can be a win–win. But the quality of other PALM workers’ experience in Australia can be hit and miss. Not every employer will visit the families of staff in their homeland, as Jonathan Moss does, or learn a traditional dance and perform it with her I-Kiribati colleagues, as Kylie Titlow did at the Kiribati national day celebrations in Sydney in July 2025.
It would be good to be able to say that problems in the scheme arise from a few rogue employers. But the reality is more complex, as I discover when I meet up with Samuel (not his real name) at a noodle bar one Saturday in another regional town.
He has promised to introduce me to a couple of Fijians employed at the local abattoir under the PALM scheme. I offer to buy them lunch, and shortly before midday, Samuel texts to ask if it’s okay if another two PALM workers join us. “Great,” I reply, expecting to meet four Islanders.
We take a table big enough to seat six but then add extra chairs and tables when more workers arrive. Soon we’re spilling over into the adjacent row of tables. In all, more than a dozen PALM workers show up. Some are too shy — or perhaps too wary — to speak to me. Most, though, are eager to share stories and vent frustrations about their experiences at the meatworks.
“Wednesdays we’ve been told not to work,” one says, which means a four-day working week. “The contractor is asking us to apply for annual leave on those days. We don’t want to.”
It’s winter, and the flow of livestock to be slaughtered has slowed, so their hours have been reduced in apparent breach of guidelines requiring long-term PALM workers to be offered “full-time hours in every week of their placement.” But another provision allows for workers to be stood down for reasons beyond an employer’s control. Even if it’s within the rules, the Fijians are disgruntled.
When the abattoir is busy, workers are asked to do an extra shift on Saturdays — but without, they say, getting paid the time-and-a-half hourly rate they believe they are entitled to.
One man tells me that if he gets injured on the job he keeps working because he doesn’t want to lose any pay. “I got kicked by a beef [steer], but I finished the day,” he says. “You just keep working if you get hurt, to earn more money.”
Another tells me PALM workers get called to work even when they are sick and have a medical certificate. They’re entitled to sick leave and workers compensation, so they shouldn’t lose pay if an injury or illness forces them to miss work.
Most say their hourly rate has barely changed since they started in 2022, though they have become much more productive. All arrived untrained; after two months, once they were proficient, management increased the number of cows, sheep and goats to be slaughtered daily. But the only time they noticed a significant rise in their take home pay was in July 2024 after the government’s Stage 3 tax cuts kicked in.
The Meat Industry Award has risen in small increments since the workers started, but most are being paid at low rates even though they describe working at higher grades.
“I work on the kill floor, the most hard job there,” says one.
“The pay doesn’t meet the work we do,” says another. “We know all the jobs.”
A third man tells me the PALM workers are training new recruits from China. “We’re teaching them. They don’t speak English.”
“They’re doing the easy jobs, we’re doing the hard jobs,” someone else adds.
The central grievance is that conditions in Australia have not lived up to what they believe they were promised when they were recruited.
“It’s different to what they told us before we came,” says one. “The work is much harder, and the cost of living is much higher.”
They expected to be trained as skilled workers and then sponsored to stay in Australia. Whether such promises were made or were misunderstood is impossible to judge, but the Fijians feel let down and ill-treated.
Unlike the PALM workers I met at Mossmont Nurseries and Finley Regional Care, these meatworkers were not direct employees. Rather, like two-thirds of all PALM workers, they were employed via a labour-hire agency, muddying the lines of responsibility and contributing to miscommunication and misunderstanding.
After more than three years in Australian the Fijian workers had gained enough experience to undertake the most difficult tasks in a dangerous industry, yet they would soon leave Australia without any formal recognition of their skills. If they return for another four-year stint, as many hope to do, they will once again be employed at the lowest level.
More than forty people came from the Pacific to work at this abattoir, all of them expecting to stay four years on long-term PALM visas. Fewer than half still work there. Some went home, the workers tell me, some were sacked, and others remain in Australia but now work elsewhere in breach of their visa conditions — a phenomenon known as “disengaging” but sometimes called “absconding.”
It was evident the remaining meatworkers would have switched to a different employer if they had been permitted to do so without leaving PALM. This points to an apparent contradiction in the scheme: workers value it highly and want to keep returning to Australia to work, yet many would also like to change jobs.
A large-scale survey by the Australian National University and the World Bank asked PALM workers to rate their experiences in Australia on a scale from one to ten. The average score was 8.5, but more than one in four said they would prefer to work for a different employer.
A much smaller survey by the Migrant Justice Institute found 97 per cent of PALM workers wanted to return to Australia but two-thirds reported they would change to a different employer if allowed. They wanted to be treated better and work in safer conditions. As the researchers note, workers’ desire to continue participating in PALM does not necessarily reflect strong satisfaction with past experiences.
There is an irony in the name PALM: although it’s a labour mobility scheme, it effectively restricts movement. Workers move from the Pacific to Australia but have almost zero labour market mobility after they get here. They are bound to their approved employers for the duration of their stay, whether it’s nine months or four years. If they leave their approved employer, then they must either return home or become unlawful.
This has two negative consequences. The first is that some PALM workers silently suffer exploitative conditions that Australians could challenge or walk away from. The second is that other PALM workers who experience workplace problems breach their visa conditions and disengage, as more than 7000 have done since 2019. Many of them applied for protection as refugees and in some cases were granted bridging visas with work rights — enabling them to work wherever they choose — while their cases were determined.
Among experts, the causes of disengagement are hotly debated. One view is that disengagement is primarily driven by pull factors: offers of higher pay outside the scheme or the greater flexibility offered by bridging visas. The counterview emphasises push factors: insufficient work hours, excessive deductions, abuse, substandard accommodation and sexual assault. Many disengaged PALM workers — including women who have fallen pregnant and fear returning home to possible family retribution — end up in extremely precarious circumstances.
Of course, pull and push factors can operate simultaneously. But disengagement has fallen sharply since changes to the PALM scheme gave workers greater protections, suggesting push factors outweighed pull factors in shaping workers’ decisions to leave the scheme.
In 2020–21, ten in a hundred PALM workers abandoned the scheme, but in 2024–25 only three in a hundred left. In the intervening period, the Albanese government required employers to guarantee workers at least thirty hours a week of paid employment averaged over a month, and ensure they take home at least $200 a week even when deductions are being made from their wages to repay costs like airfares.
The Australian Workers’ Union also secured a Fair Work Commission ruling guaranteeing a minimum wage for horticultural work. Employers can still offer piece rates as an incentive, but every worker must receive the minimum hourly rate, no matter how much they pick or prune.
Problems persist, though, and further improvements are needed.
The expert panel commissioned to review Australia’s migration system in 2023 concluded that mobility restrictions “limit a migrant worker’s capacity to resist, report or leave exploitive situations.” The NSW Anti-Slavery Commissioner agrees that “tied employment… should be avoided because it promotes exploitation, depresses wages and performs the role of a quasi-‘subsidy’ to particular employers, occupations or sectors.” The Grattan Institute is emphatic: PALM workers should be able to change employers more easily “to reduce the risk of exploitation.”
More mobility would force poor bosses to lift their standards or lose staff. PALM workers would have more options if they suffer abuse. Incentives to disengage from the scheme would be reduced.
But there are practical challenges. Because employers currently pay upfront travel and visa costs to bring workers to Australia, they could be out of pocket if workers changed jobs before repaying those debts. But the government could cover those expenses, and recoup them through the tax system — as was Labor’s policy before the 2022 election.
Flexibility could be sector specific, with meatworkers allowed to move more freely within the meat processing industry, horticultural workers within horticulture, aged care workers within aged care. Or, since most PALM workers are employed by labour-hire agencies, greater mobility could allow any labour-hire employee to switch to a different labour-hire agency, regardless of the work they do.
To be true to its name — Pacific Australia Labour Mobility — PALM must allow workers to move more easily between employers. •
This is an edited excerpt from Improving PALM, a narrative report on the Pacific Australia Labour Mobility Scheme commissioned by the Scanlon Foundation Research Institute. The author’s views do not represent the position of the Scanlon Foundation.
