Wolf Creek Economics: Labor Discovers Backpackers!
Labor has surveyed a nation growling about housing, rents, wages and migration, considered a temporary migrant population measured in the millions, and identified the fellow responsible. He is twenty-three, German, sleeping in a hostel and currently picking almonds outside Mildura.
At last, Australia can relax. The Albanese government is proposing a ballot for second-year working-holiday visas, a substantial reduction in their number and a much more dramatic restriction on third-year stays. It is being presented as part of the government's response to Australia's swollen temporary migration system. After years in which population growth outran housing construction and net overseas migration reached extraordinary levels, Canberra has discovered the backpacker.
It is difficult to think of a more politically convenient migrant to pursue. Backpackers are foreign, conspicuous and genuinely temporary. They have no powerful university lobby, no multinational employer arranging their visa, no permanent bureaucracy constructed around keeping them here and, most importantly, no vote. Reducing their numbers produces an excellent headline without requiring government to attack the larger interests embedded in Australia's migration machine.
There is also the small matter of where backpackers actually work. The working-holiday system has long pushed young visitors towards regional employment because specified work can qualify them for additional time in Australia. That has supplied labour to agriculture, tourism and hospitality in precisely those places where employers often struggle to find Australians willing or available to perform seasonal work. Farmers are therefore understandably less enthusiastic about Canberra's discovery that the fruit picker is a threat to national carrying capacity.
The political geography is almost too neat. Restricting backpackers is likely to be felt disproportionately in regional Australia rather than in the metropolitan electorates where housing pressure and population congestion are most visible. The government gets to announce migration restraint while much of the immediate economic cost falls somewhere else. This is migration policy by stage prop.
Backpackers are particularly useful because they look like migration without representing its most structurally difficult components. They arrive at airports with enormous packs, live in crowded accommodation and move visibly through tourist and agricultural centres. If a government wants photographs suggesting that it is reducing temporary migration, they are considerably easier to explain than the dense architecture of student visas, graduate visas, skilled visas, bridging visas, dependants and the pathways connecting temporary residence with permanent settlement.
One Nation has been arguing for reductions in the temporary migrant stock measured in hundreds of thousands. Labor's answer is much more modest: squeeze the young traveller who finances a trip around Australia by working in a vineyard. There is a delicious cultural irony here because Australia has already produced its definitive work on the backpacker problem.
It was called Wolf Creek. Greg McLean's 2005 horror film takes the great Australian backpacker anxiety and reverses it. The foreigners are not the threat. Australia is. The young British visitors wander innocently into the interior and encounter Mick Taylor, the smiling embodiment of everything terrifying that might be waiting beyond the last reliable mobile-phone signal.
Mick does not worry that backpackers are taking Australian jobs. He gives them something considerably more serious to worry about. That inversion is what makes Wolf Creek useful here. The old Australian fear surrounding backpackers was never really that hordes of Europeans would arrive and overwhelm the housing market. Backpackers were transient figures moving through the country, working bad jobs, sleeping cheaply, drinking too much and eventually going home. The darker cultural joke was that the enormous Australian landscape might swallow them before they got there. Now Canberra has apparently decided that the backpacker is the menace.
The numbers deserve some perspective. A serious discussion about migration must deal with the whole system: net overseas migration, the enormous stock of temporary visa holders, international education, graduate pathways, skilled migration, family migration, humanitarian intake and the relationship between population growth and Australia's chronic inability to build sufficient housing and infrastructure.
Whether immigration is ultimately too high or too low, governments should at least be prepared to connect the categories they reduce with the problems they claim to be solving. If Sydney rents are the concern, demonstrate how reducing seasonal workers in regional Australia materially changes Sydney's rental market. If wage suppression is the concern, identify where working-holiday labour is displacing Australians rather than filling seasonal shortages. If the temporary migrant stock is the concern, explain why this particular component deserves priority over much larger categories. Otherwise, the policy begins to look suspiciously like hunting for the visa holder least capable of fighting back.
The possibilities for bureaucratic theatre are considerable. Somewhere in Canberra there will presumably be a spreadsheet containing a column for "non-genuine working holiday makers." Officials will develop criteria. Consultants will explain the criteria. A young Swedish woman who intended to spend six months picking grapes before seeing the Barrier Reef may eventually discover that she has become part of Australia's housing affordability strategy. She could reasonably ask how this happened.
She did not establish the migration targets. She did not approve the university business model. She did not decide that population growth could substitute for productivity growth. She did not create Australia's planning system, infrastructure bottlenecks or housing shortage. She merely arrived under a visa deliberately designed by the Australian government and did the regional work the same government encouraged her to do. Yet she makes an excellent defendant because the larger defendants are politically awkward.
Universities employ people and export education. Business wants labour. State governments like population growth until infrastructure bills arrive. Property interests benefit from demand. Canberra likes the GDP produced by additional people even when GDP per person looks considerably less impressive. Every important part of the migration system therefore has somebody important prepared to defend it.
The backpacker has a surfboard. There is an older folklore surrounding these travellers: the backpacker taking a local job, crowding a kitchen, working for cash or beginning a romance whose expiration date mysteriously coincides with the visa. Australians have been laughing about such things for decades. But nobody seriously constructed the national economic model around the proposition that the young traveller picking strawberries was responsible for the country's structural problems.
That is what makes the present exercise so revealing. It confuses the visibility of a migrant with the significance of a migration category. The real migration debate is considerably harder. Australia has to decide how large a population it wants, how quickly it can expand without reducing living standards, how much migration is economically productive, whether temporary programs are genuinely temporary, whether universities have become excessively dependent upon foreign enrolments, and whether infrastructure and housing should determine migration levels rather than perpetually trying to catch up with them. Those questions create enemies. Cutting backpackers creates press releases.
Perhaps the government believes every reduction helps. Mathematically that is true. Remove enough small categories and eventually the total becomes smaller. But politics is about priorities, and priorities reveal what governments are willing to confront.
There should be no gloating over backpackers losing opportunities either. These are overwhelmingly young people who came because Australia invited them. Many perform difficult work in places where employers need labour, spend their earnings here and return home with memories of the country. They are about as close as a migrant can come to the traditional meaning of "temporary."
Which brings us back to Wolf Creek. Mick Taylor's Australia was frightening because the harmless foreign traveller wandered into a landscape where the locals held all the power. Twenty-one years later the method has become more civilised. Nobody is chained in an abandoned mining camp. There is a minister, a ballot, a visa cap and an explanatory press release. The principle of selecting the easiest backpacker remains strangely familiar.
Australia certainly has a migration problem worth debating. It has a housing problem worth solving and a temporary visa system worth examining from top to bottom.
But if Canberra's great migration crackdown begins with the German picking almonds outside Mildura, we may reasonably suspect that Mick Taylor has been put in charge of triage. The backpacker was never the monster in Wolf Creek. That was rather the point.
