KEY POINTS:
I'm very fond of the seasonal worker scheme that lets Pacific Islanders work in the country's vineyards and orchards for up to seven months of the year, and not just because it helps to pay my mortgage (the Tongan in the household being an agent of the Tongan government for such matters, and even occasionally getting paid for his troubles when the Treasury is so disposed).
No, like the apple grower who threatens to march on Parliament if the scheme is ever dropped, I can't imagine why something that makes so much sense took so long to come along.
The rationale is simple. New Zealand's horticultural and viticultural industries need a reliable and steady supply of labour, which unreliable backpackers and choosy locals have never met (and never will).
The Pacific, on the other hand, has a surfeit of labour. One estimate has the ranks of the Pacific's unemployed swelling by 100,000 every year, threatening social cohesion and regional stability, particularly in Melanesia, which doesn't have the same migration outlets as Polynesia.
Under the Recognised Seasonal Employer (RSE) scheme, New Zealand gets workers who promise to go home again (or put the scheme at risk for those at home), while islanders get incomes many times the going rate at home.
As Dr Manjula Luthria, a senior economist with the World Bank, writes: "All the money we will ever give to poor, small, remote Pacific Islands will never equal what the islanders themselves will contribute from hard, honest work. At the moment, remittances comprise 39 per cent of GDP for Tonga, 36 per cent for Tuvalu and 14 per cent for Samoa."
It's such a good idea that the Australians are following suit with their own "guest-worker" scheme after studying New Zealand's. Their farmers calculate that not doing so would cost the Australian economy $1.1 billion in lost taxation revenue.
So what's not to like?
Well, not surprisingly for a scheme launched in April 2007 and only just coming to the end of its first season, there have been problems. People haven't always behaved as well as they ought to have done.
The most public examples include a Blenheim contractor who, according to One News, sent home a group of Kiribati workers "penniless" just over a week ago, and another Marlborough contractor who Campbell Live claimed had misled its Vanuatu workers about the amount of money they'd be earning. Twelve of them were said to be paying $125 each a week to share a 4-bedroom house.
For his part, the Blenheim contractor claimed the workers were disrespectful, lazy and uneducated, and hadn't been well enough prepared by their home government for the cold or the culture shock.
So what's been going on? Quite a lot.
Of the nearly 5000 workers from Tonga, Samoa, Vanuatu, Kiribati and Tuvalu, some have gone home with next to nothing because of a few employers who shouldn't be allowed to stay in the scheme; a few because they didn't like the work, or the cold; while others have gone home with $10,000 after costs and tax. There have been two weddings, a birth, several pregnancies, a death (through natural causes), an assault on a local by a worker, assaults by locals on workers, a rape charge (subsequently withdrawn), a boost to the fortunes of a local football club who won their local competition as a result of the imports, several incidences of drunkenness (which resulted in workers being sent home), workers who went home early because of pay disputes, and a number who didn't make their flights home (for which the employer is liable to pay $3000 each).
Some employers have been exemplary.
Vailima Orchards in Nelson put their workers in a purpose-built house and have collected children's books for them to take home.
Kerifresh in Kerikeri do their own recruiting in Tonga, and are driven to make the scheme work by seeing first-hand the level of poverty their workers come from.
Hume's Pack'n Cool in Katikati helped to pay for 18 workers to go home halfway through the season to see their families.
But a few employers seem to feel their workers should be grateful for whatever they get; and some, like those in Marlborough, have been middlemen acting for winegrowers reluctant to take responsibility for their workers.
There's room for improvement, but a report into the Tongan RSE workers by Waikato University Management School and the World Bank notes that "the vast majority of workers have not experienced problems, and the initial reports are of employers being impressed by the hard work".
There's no doubt RSE is helping the poorest, least educated islanders.
As a grateful seasonal worker called Alex says in his first email from Vanuatu: "What you people have done is so great and wonderful.
"You have helped to bring hope and a future to many of us putting bread, butter, school fees, clothes to our families and above all our identity knowing that we can do it."
* Tapu. Misa@gmail.com
