Jose Ramos-Horta, the president of Timor-Leste, for his own political purposes, last week again criticised the Pacific Australia Labour Mobility scheme. He has directed harsh words at the Australian government but has not acknowledged how his own country’s government might be at fault as well.
In my research into the seasonal worker program over more than a decade, I have become only too aware of its complexity. The starting point for any analysis is to recognise that the PALM scheme is not an aid program, where the donor through a managing contractor micromanages the program’s inputs and outputs. In contrast, the employers, both growers and labour hire firms, are in the driving seat in a real sense. They individually are the source of the demand for workers. Employers want and need to have the final say on who is employed.
How workers are vetted, selected and recruited is a key element of the formal bilateral agreement between two sovereign countries. This agreement is backed up in Australia’s case by an approved employer Deed of Agreement and a detailed set of guidelines. The latter have gone through 11 revisions since 26 June 2023, and now number 166 pages. These revisions have made the PALM scheme increasingly more regulated and inflexible in how it operates, especially for employers in agriculture.
Since June 2023, the number of short-term PALM workers in agriculture has fallen from 19,370 to 14,990 in March 2026. This is a loss of 4,380 workers, or 23%.
In addition, regular reports of worker difficulties have been prominent in the media, especially the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, SBS News and The Guardian. This reporting is almost always one-sided, with employers not canvassed for their understanding of the situation. The result is a low-trust environment for the employers, labour hire firms and at least some of the workers.
From the beginning of the seasonal worker program, employers developed their own informal system to introduce a higher level of trust into how workers are selected and assessed. This high-trust system involves employers relying on return workers each year. These workers are invited to return because they are more productive and are happy with the work and living arrangements.
However, the Timorese government has built its own instability into the PALM program in three ways. First, this is done by controlling who is selected for a shortlist presented to an employer. The labour department insists employers select all new workers from the department’s own labour pool. This forces employers to take another round of untested new workers with the lack of skills and understanding of what to expect that they bring with them. Requiring the employer to use the department’s own shortlist also creates a high risk of corruption in the form of staff demanding payment. This was confirmed by an ABC video media report in April 2026, in which the head of the labour department acknowledged that a member of his staff had demanded and received a bribe.
The second source of instability is that the Timorese labour department has posted two Timorese civil servants to Darwin to be country liaison officers. These officials are not only in a location where there are few Timorese workers (in March 2026 there were 240 in the Northern Territory, 4.7% of the 5,115 Timorese PALM workers in Australia). These civil servants are from Dili and therefore have little understanding of Australian society. The feedback from various sources is that they are missing in action. In contrast, other sending countries such as Fiji have country liaison officers from their diaspora who are Australian residents. They reside in Melbourne, Sydney, Perth and Guildford, NSW. This means they are located within a reasonable travelling time to where their countries’ workers are.
The third source of instability generated by the Timorese government is the pressure on the embassy, and the ambassador in particular, to fill the gap. This requires that the ambassador spend her valuable time visiting workers in remote locations and reporting back to meetings with government agencies in Canberra. The problems identified are not addressed at the workplace but become the basis for formal complaints at a high diplomatic level.
In addition to resolving problems at workplace level, meetings at bilateral government-to-government level are also needed. A mechanism is required to note problems which go beyond a specific workplace. Its task should be to devise solutions, trial them, report back and, where successful, scale up. The existing officials are not suited to do this, as they are too limited by what they perceive to be their mandates. This applies to both the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations and the embassies and high commissions of the sending countries.
What is needed are high-level (that is, ministerial) bilateral discussions held on a regular basis (say every six months) between an Australian government minister or parliamentary secretary with each of the four major sending countries. These discussions should also include other key players, especially employer and labour hire representatives. These meetings need to be organised so that they are problem-solving exercises, accountable to senior government ministers.
4/6 Correction: in March 2026 there were 240 workers in the Northern Territory, 4.7% of 5,115 Timorese PALM workers in Australia.
This is a lightly edited version of an article first published in The Australian.
Read the author’s recent journal article “Australia’s Seasonal Worker Program: Working Out Ways to Manage Risk”.
Let’s put this in perspective:
1) The Australian Government owns the program, as part of their regional foreign relations strategy
2) Australian companies get international workers via the scheme, at a effective lower cost
3) In some cases these, these companies treat their international employees under conditions that can be compared to modern slavery, as reported multiple times in the media
4) There is a clear unbalance of power and foreign workers usually don’t complain about these conditions
Yet you argue the responsibility to ensure Australian working standards and protections reside on a foreign government auditing work conditions on Australian soil?
Neither can’t I see a valid argument in your article on how or why Ramos-Horta is using this for “political purposes” (what purpose apparently?), neither that the Timorese see the program as “aid”, this is a very paternalistic and westernized view.
President Ramos-Horta requested Australia to take ownership on the problem.
We created the program. It benefits Australian foreign relationships as well as Australian farmers, it is done on our soil, under our jurisdiction. I failed to see how the blame can be passed to Timor-Leste.
This is not an isolated event and it also is worth also noticing that similar issues to what happened to Timorese workers have been reported for other nationalities in the PALM scheme.
Thank you for your response. PALM is based on a series of bilateral agreements between two sovereign states, each state has a set of obligations to meet as part of that agreement. As I stated, it is not an aid program where the recipient country has few if any obligations.
PALM workers are more expensive to employ because they are entitled to the higher casual rate of pay but also have a fixed term work contract with minimum pay guaranteed. So employers are employing them for other reasons such as reliability and not because they are paid less than other workers.
The role of CLOs is be a trusted intermediary for their country’s workers to provide advice in a way they can understand and act on. This is particularly important for Timorese workers who are likely to have little or no English. Timorese government officials residing in Darwin and expected to be CLOs are not meeting an important part of making a complex system of welfare support work as it should.
Hi Richard. Keen for you to see what the Vanuatu CLO space is doing.
Pita, Happy to talk with you about what the two of you are doing in your role as country liaison officers (CLOs) for the PALM program.
Another excellent article from Dr Curtain. The PALM scheme is indeed not an aid program, at least not officially — Australia has AusAID for that purpose, and employers are meant to drive demand.
However, from a recruiter’s perspective, the extensive contracting out of operations and the funding of Labour Sending Units (LSUs) across sending countries via the Pacific Labour Mobility Support Program (PLMSP) and its predecessor, the Pacific Labour Facility (PLF), have created a strong de facto aid-like operating climate. This includes heavy centralised systems (PALMIS and In-Country Recruitment Databases (IRD)) and compliance requirements that many participants experience as donor-driven micromanagement.
These features may help explain why President Jose Ramos-Horta has made the comments he has. What Australia sees as necessary program integrity and worker protections can be viewed by sovereign sending nations as excessive external influence over their labour mobility systems. We have seen similar sovereignty concerns raised by the Vanuatu Government during recent bilateral talks around the Nakamal Agreement.
At the root of these tensions is the persistent myth that the PALM scheme is an aid program. There is no coincidence that many NGO stakeholders have seized upon this myth giving it more traction. This has allowed an aid ethos to linger, shaping how worker welfare is approached and managed. As a result, meaningful control has been removed from both employers and their recruiters, as well as from sending country governments. This power vacuum has likely triggered the current pushback. Employers largely remain silent, as do many LSUs and recruiters, for fear of being disenfranchised or losing access to the scheme.
A clear example of this mission creep is the In-Country Recruitment Database (IRD). Originally intended as a recruitment and worker tracking tool, it is increasingly morphing into a much broader citizen information system. In some countries it is now being used as a statistical and census-like resource, with East Timor reportedly uploading electoral card data and a new feature incorporating voting constituency information. (Constituencies are voting ‘electorates’ used in Vanuatu.) While improved data management has benefits, this expansion raises legitimate questions about national data sovereignty and the appropriate scope of a labour mobility program. Those extra features, to which outside of a particular sending country, is surely out of scope.
While the centralised approach has delivered benefits in record-keeping, it risks undermining the very employer-driven model the program was designed to be.
Thanks Richard, a very informative and balanced article. I also have found analysis of the comparative economic benefits to Australia vs Timor-Leste to be pretty unconvincing. Typically, one worker salary in Australia pays the living costs of the one worker, and then 1/4 of that is sent to Timor to support a whole family with a new house, motorbike and even fund a small business in several cases. The amount spent in Australia is more, but that is because Australia is an expensive place to live. The benefit is far greater in Timor-Leste.
Many thanks Brett for your comment. It is important to note that the analysis of the comparative economic benefits to Australia vs Timor-Leste you refer to is one made by the President in his Op Ed of 20 May.