Editorial: Recognised Seasonal Employee programme needs an immediate change of name and culture

RSE workers from Vanuatu harvest avocados. Photo / Michael Craig

EDITORIAL

Deputy Prime Minister Carmel Sepuloni led a New Zealand ministerial delegation to the Solomon Islands, Fiji and Tonga in April as part of a Pacific Mission, the first since Covid.

As the Pacific region is a priority for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Mission centred around reconnecting with Pacific nations.

One of the major agenda topics was the Recognised Seasonal Employee (RSE) programme, how it is viewed and how it serves Pacific people.

The RSE scheme has enabled New Zealand employers in the horticulture and viticulture sector to recruit a capped number of seasonal workers from eligible Pacific Island countries annually to plant, maintain, harvest or pack crops.

The feedback around Sepuloni’s delegation was instant. The sentiment from islanders felt the name “RSE” was demeaning and the culture, which has used our Pacific Island whānau since its inception in 2007, degrading.

Over the past 15 years, 101,840 RSE visa arrivals have made it to New Zealand.

When New Zealand has needed unskilled and highly motivated workers, we’ve had no qualms about using our Pacific Island cousins. This was of course, under the guise that we were helping our Pacific neighbours, because the money they earn in six months in New Zealand will sustain families for long periods in their home villages.

Now we have moved on to also include semi-skilled and highly skilled Pacific Island workers, contributing to the Pacific Island brain drain.

Importing talent from the Pacific is nothing new for New Zealand or Australia. New Zealand and Australian rugby have played this game for years - using the Pacific Islands as a players’ nursery before taking the best on offer overseas. What kid from the Pacific Islands wouldn’t want to play for the All Blacks, Australia or in the NRL?

In the year to June 2023, 48,000 people left the Pacific Islands to work under New Zealand’s RSE scheme and Australia’s Pacific Australia Labour Mobility (Palm) scheme. The latest figures were almost double those from 2018-19.

In our quest for fit and healthy migrant workers from the Pacific Islands - estimated to be about 20 per cent of the male working populations of Tonga and Vanuatu - we have inadvertently messed up their social apple carts.

Workers who would have previously filled jobs on farms, schools, hospitals and other sectors in their home countries are instead bailing out New Zealand and Australian horticulture and viticulture companies.

The money the workers receive is more than they could earn in their homelands and the major factor for them leaving their homes.

But does money fully compensate for the loss of these young men moving away from their cultures, their families, their churches and their communities?

Last week, the Archbishop of Fiji bemoaned the “dark side of seasonal work”, saying it is no longer the win-win deal it was originally intended to be.

The balance has tipped in favour of the New Zealand and Australian economies, which are getting richer through the sweat of the Pacific Island labour force.

One of the changes this new Government should make is simple - change the name of RSE to a title befitting a partnership New Zealand has with our Pacific Island friends, not a stranglehold.

Changing its culture will take more than the flick of a pen.