Modern ‘Blackbirding’? by Malachi Doyle.

“PALM scheme

The Pacific Australia Labour Mobility (PALM) scheme is a temporary migration program which allows eligible Australian businesses to hire workers from nine Pacific islands and Timor-Leste when there are not enough local workers available.

Through the PALM scheme, Pacific and Timor-Leste workers take up a range of short term (up
to 9 months) and long-term job opportunities (one to four years) in low and semi-skilled positions, enabling them to develop skills and send income home to support their families and communities.

PALM scheme workers are required to depart Australia to encourage them to reconnect with their families and communities.  This is for three months following the conclusion of a short-term placement and six months following the conclusion of a long-term placement.

 

… Participating Countries: Fiji, Kiribati, Nauru, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Timor-Leste, Tonga, Tuvalu, Vanuatu.”

 

(source Australian Department of Trade and Foreign Affairs)

 

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I talk with people. I don’t wear my headphones all the time in public, shutting others’ lives out.

 

I believe in fostering Community, Democracy & Peace.

 

Because of my early adult links with the Fijian community, singing and playing the drums, I have a sympathy for Pacific Islanders.

 

I think they’re forgotten by most of my kind.

 

They’re such near neighbours and yet we see and hear so little about them, other than belittling accounts – the likes of Chris Lillee’s Jonah From Tonga series, made by a white mimic in blackface.

 

For years teaching Islander children, I heard discriminatory remarks as to the “hopelessness” of most Islander students, in a way one would never hear regarding other Indigenous students like the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders.

Evidently 3^rd World poverty and disadvantage due to Colonisation matters little unless you are trending as today’s latest ‘brick in the wall’.

White Middle Class Australia appears only capable of viewing one ‘issue’ (as such things regarding people are called) at a time, unable to consider the Geo-Political & Historical underpinnings of our Oceanic region, as inter-related with ourselves.

 

Australia’s history of ‘blackbirding’ Pacific Islanders as slaves on Sugar Plantations, has barely reached the press or school history books. I find this unforgivable from a class who are, in the majority, University educated.

 

‘Blackbirding’: “In the 19th- and early 20th-century practice of enslaving (often by force and deception) South Pacific islanders on the cotton and sugar plantations of Queensland, Australia (as well as those of the Fiji and Samoan islands). The kidnapped islanders were known collectively as Kanakas (see Kanaka).” (source britannica.com)

 

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The question is whether the current PALM scheme is so radically different from historical ‘blackbirding’?

 

Pacific Islanders from participating countries, tend, I glean, to be young men seeking a better life for themselves and their families.

Their jobs, which the DFAT policy document states, are “low to semi-skilled”.

From my understanding, they tend to be the jobs Australians won’t touch, for example abattoir working.

 

Imagine, for minute, a young man from an Indigenous Pacific Island, 20-21 years of age, being forced to live in squalid rental accommodation, lonely and homesick in a country where they are in a tiny minority, being subject to racism and discrimination, forced to adapt to an English speaking & predominantly white European Post-Modern Technologically advanced culture, earning pittance and being tasked to kill thousands of animals daily so we Middle Class can enjoy the ‘finer’ things?

Imagine the psychological cost?

Being denied the right to ‘grow’ themselves professionally, to upskill?

As foreigners, they are expected to pay Overseas Student fees on the same grading as wealthy Asian and Western students. Obviously, they cannot.

 

The question I ask then is, is this a modern slavery, that only Our country benefits from?

What skills can these people bring with them back to their home countries, when their short term visas expire?

How can they afford to send anything home from their low incomes?

In short,

How do these visas help Pacific Islander Nations?

 

Why does no one in Australia care?

 

Why is the media silent?

 

What does Penny Wong say?

 

Why is an amateur, a regular guy, the one to raise it?

 

Isa,

Malakai

 

Published & Copyright Malachi Doyle 2023.