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Islanders should come as paid, working “guests”, says academic

June 16, 2005

Ware thumb.jpgPacific Islanders should be allowed into Australia to work in jobs that many Australians shun, an academic at The University of New England will argue at her Inaugural Lecture.

Professor Helen Ware says Islanders should be employed as “guest workers” to do a variety of jobs, such as fruit-picking and working in nursing homes. This, she says, offers employment to Islanders and is far better for Pacific Island economies than continually giving them aid. “This is a targeted migration scheme to promote peace for the region and development for our Pacific Island neighbours,” Professor Ware says.

She is due to deliver her lecture, “Promoting Peace through Development: Is Australia Doing Enough?”, at Armidale Town Hall on Thursday, June 23.

Professor Ware (pictured here) began her academic career as a researcher in Nigeria at the close of the civil war. She has variously served as Director of Research for the Human Rights Commission and as Australia’s High Commissioner to Zambia and “ambassador” to the African National Congress. In her Inaugural Lecture she will show how Australia’s “hands-off” foreign policy in the Pacific Islands has changed in recent years to being far more actively interventionist in the light of concerns about the consequences of these states’ economies (and governmental structures) failing.

One way to help these economies, she will argue, is to offer all Pacific Islanders who are interested the chance to work, under a new visa scheme, in Australia. “That would be better than giving these countries aid, and would allow their citizens to earn cash,” she says. “It would also help Australia’s economy, since these workers would take up employment where Australians do not necessarily want to work, such as in nursing homes.”

Professor Ware points out that Australia lets Britons and people of other nationalities, such as Estonians, come to Australia on working holiday visas. “It is simple racism not to allow our Pacific neighbours the same access to work in Australia”, she says. “Australia is all for free trade in goods – where we are the ones who benefit. Why not free trade in people where the benefit is equal on both sides? The Pacific Islanders supply the labour and earn money to take home, and Australia gets the work done and forms closer bonds with its neighbours.

“As sea levels rise we will have to take the Islanders in in any case,” she says.


Media contact: Professor Helen Ware, School of Professional Development and Leadership, UNE 6773 2442 or Lydia Roberts, Public Relations Manager, UNE 6773 2779.

Posted by Jim Scanlan at June 16, 2005 10:38 AM