Dr Victoria Stead made a submission to the Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade inquiry into Australia activating trade and investment with Pacific Island countries.

Dr Stead welcomed the inquiry, saying she hoped it would lead to deeper consideration on Australia’s part about is place in the region, and more equitable relationships between Australia and its Pacific Island neighbours. “Temporary labour schemes are an increasingly significant part of the way Australia engages in the region,” Dr Stead explained, “but Australia should recognise that in this area, long-running dynamics are being reproduced and these are often deeply unequal.”

Dr Stead’s submission was based on two of her current bodies of research, Race, Labour and Belonging: Strengthening Rural Workforces and Communities, which focuses on Australia’s Seasonal Worker Programme (SWP) and the experiences of Pacific Islander workers, farmers, and local Pacific Islander communities in northcentral Victoria, and War Memories and War Tourism, which focuses on the trekking industry associated with the Kokoda Track in Papua New Guinea.

Drawing on her research, Dr Stead’s submission made several recommendations based on four key findings, largely relating to inequality and uncertainty felt by many Pacific Islanders, working both as seasonal labourers in the Australian horticultural industry and as the employees of Australian trekking companies in Papua New Guinea. Both these industries are at risk of “representing and treating the Pacific as a particular kind of place (a source of cheap, compliant labour), and Pacific Islanders as particular kinds of people (good for low-skilled, otherwise undesirable work). Such characterisations would be reductive, dangerous, insulting, and harmful to our regional relationships,” the submission said.

Among the recommendations, Dr Stead called for Australia to “recognise and protect Pacific Islanders workers as workers, not as development beneficiaries. Ensure that Pacific Islander workers have actual, not simply rhetorical, access to the workplace rights and securities available to Australian workers” and “Institute greater freedom and ease of movement for Pacific Islanders seeking to travel to Australia.

“Although the PNG trekking industry and the Australian horticultural industry involve very different kinds of work”, Dr Stead said, “thinking about them in the same frame provides an opportunity to reflect on the movements of people travelling in both directions between Australia and Pacific countries.” Doing so, she continued, highlights “the contrast between the ease of movement for Australians – trekkers and corporate operators working in PNG, for example – with the comparative difficulty and restrictions faced by Pacific Islanders seeking to travel here.

The submission also calls for the Australian government to embark on deeper engagement with Pacific Island trading partners, communities and individuals to gain a deeper understanding of the needs of Pacific Islanders beyond the simple benefits of aid and development. “Australia really positions itself as being a ‘good neighbour’ to Pacific Island countries, using a language of development and benevolence,” Dr  Stead said, “But I want to highlight the inequalities in power that run through our history of engagement in the region, and continue to structure our present relationships. To really be a good neighbour, Australia needs to give some critical reflection to these inequalities and the kinds of structural change that would be required to shift them.”

Dr Victoria Stead is an anthropologist whose work also has an interdisciplinary focus, engaging cognate areas of politics, geography, development studies, history, and postcolonial studies. Her current research coheres around two key areas of interest and activity. The first of these engages themes of conflict, memory, landscape and development in relation to the legacies of the Second World War in Papua New Guinea, including the growth of war tourism in the region surrounding the Kokoda Track. The second focuses on labour in the Australian horticultural industry, with a geographical focus on the Shepparton region in northern Victoria. Discourses and practices relating to horticultural labour are strongly inflected with considerations of race and class, and have complex histories that are also bound up with Australia’s colonial history. Pacific Islanders and East Timorese are amongst those who travel to the area to work as fruit pickers, and their experiences intersect with the labour experiences of Indigenous communities, as well as migrants and refugees from Asia and the Middle East, European backpackers, and an increasingly marginalised White local underclass. Connecting these two strands of research activity is a focus on the Australia-Pacific region, a concern with contemporary postcolonialism and the reverberations of the past in the present, and an empirical and theoretical attention to land and landscape.