It may be too hot to be Siberia, but prisoners in the Northern Territory are being sent to a salt mine to work.
The low-security inmates have been sent to Karinga Lakes, about 250km from Alice Springs, under the Northern Territory's new Sentenced to a Job programme.
The joint venture project, run by Rum Jungle Resources, extracts potassium sulphate from the mineral-rich lakes, and has been included in a programme touted to businesses as a pool of reliable labour that can be of "significant benefit to [their] bottom lines".
The NT Government says the prisoners have been sent to the remote Karinga Lake project because the company has had difficulty attracting other workers. But the United Voice union claims the Government is using prisoners as "slave labour", paying them well below the going rate for other mine workers.
"We've had some miners in those different areas we represent coming forward, and they're a bit worried because of these large mining companies who actually quite happily use undercutting of labour and undercutting of wages to try and maximise their profits while driving down the different areas," union secretary Matthew Gardiner said.