A blanket ban disallowing the counting of volunteer work for the purposes of qualifying for a second work holiday visa has been the response of the department of immigration to the alleged widespread abuse of the sc417 visa programme.

There will be nothing to stop legitimate volunteers working for worthy causes which deliver valuable community services but their good intentions will not be allowed to be counted towards eligibility for a second visa.

The reforms are part of the government’s new measures to increase the integrity of the program. The change essentially require those seeking to apply for a second Working Holiday visa to produce an official payslip from their employer, demonstrating they have completed their regional work component. A DIBP media release states that the change will take some time to introduce, and is not yet in effect, so it does not impact upon current second Working Holiday visa applications at present.

The damage of this blanket ban on voluntary work however could see the end of organisations like Willing Workers on Organic Farms (WWOOF) which has some 2,600 hosts in Australia.

"If the government brings in this business of backpackers needing to produce a payslip to get their 88 days to extend their visa for a year, that's going to hurt the WWOOF organisation quite a bit," Lismore farmer Geof Bugden told the ABC recently. Mr Bugden relies on WWOOF workers.

WWOOF essentially link backpackers to organic farmers by giving them the opportunity to work on Australian organic farms, exchanging 4 - 6 hours work per day for meals and accommodation, usually in the farmer’s family home.

Between 29 March 2015 and 1 April 2015, a number of blog posts and Tweets were published by Ms Liana Allan and Mr Christopher Levingston on the Migration Alliance Incorporated website and Twitter feed. The blog posts and Tweets, in the first instance, concerned the content of a lecture given by Ms Duncan to a class of students completing the ANU visa course 8168 at UTS on 29 March 2015. Subsequent blog posts and Tweets related to Ms Duncan's rebuttal of the initial publications.

The blog posts and Tweets have since been removed by us and we do not wish to "reignite the fire" by restating here, in any detail, the contents of those blog posts and Tweets.

While we based the comments we posted on what was reported to us by a student as having been said by Ms Duncan during the lecture, we accept that what we published went further than what we now understand Ms Duncan to have actually said. Further, we accept that we took Ms Duncan's words out of context and may have given them a meaning that was not intended by Ms Duncan. This, in turn, means we unfairly characterised Ms Duncan's subsequent rebuttal.

The exploitation of sc417 workers revealed by the ABC report this week put into the spotlight a shadow economy reliant on low-skilled workers which various governments of the day have refused to acknowledge.

“Officially, Australia only has a high-skilled migration programme (namely, the 457 visa), but in truth the Australian labour market is flooded with low-skilled temporary migrant workers on other visas”, state two academics in an opinion piece in The Age today.

There is a large underclass of workers in the agriculture and hospitality industries made up foreigners on various types of temporary visas including work/holiday visas, student visas and tourist visas. The numbers are not known but their plight is only talked about when media reports pierce the veil of secrecy behind which these vulnerable individuals work and are exploited.

“So how have we allowed this to happen? Successive Coalition and Labor governments have not only tolerated this unskilled migrant workforce, but have encouraged its growth,” state the opinion piece by Dr Joanna Howe and Associate Professor Alexander Reilly of the Adelaide Law School.

The academics propose that Australia introduce an official entry stream for low-skilled workers.

The department of immigration says that the exploitation of foreign workers in Australia is hard to uncover. ABCs hidden cameras however had no trouble revealing some of the shocking practices. There are now calls for the introduction of a low-skill work visa to allow for greater transparency and monitoring of foreign workers in the agriculture industry.

A Four Corners investigation this week has revealed that food being picked, packed and processed by exploited workers is being sold to consumers nationwide. The programme alleges that supermarkets and fast food outlets are involved naming Woolworths, Coles, Aldi, IGA, Costco, KFC, Red Rooster and Subway as retailers receiving produce from such suppliers.

Baiada, Australia’s largest poultry supplier came under the spotlight in the programme with allegations that it has deliberately engaged labour contractors in order to avoid direct responsibility for the exploitation. Baiada has previously been caught out by the Fairwork Ombudsman for underpaying workers, according to the programme.

The report says that workers are forced to work a relentless pace, criticized and abused endlessly, not allowed to drink water or even go to the toilet for hours on end. They live in cramped quarters and are paid well below the minimum wage with the contractors skimming off on their wages. There are claims that underpayment is estimated in some cases at about AU$30,000 per individual per year.

“All of the major suppliers are using dodgy labour hire contracting arrangements that fundamentally exploit the workers who pick and pack the vegetables,” alleged George Robertson of the National Union of Workers, Victoria.

Industry insiders and federal politicians are calling for urgent reforms to Australia's fresh food supply chain before it is too late. There are calls at a federal level for the supermarkets to stop shirking responsibility by passing accountability back to the suppliers and farmers. There have been calls to introduce a low-skill work visa in order allow for more transparency and monitoring by the authorities.

The Productivity Commission’s suggestion of selling Australian visas which some estimate will be in the order of $50,000 per visa rubs against the Australian ethos of a fair-go.

Australia already has the SIV which is a pathway for the wealthy. Perhaps that scheme needs to investigated and improved. Instead what we have are proposed changes to the SIV which could actually see the wealthy turn away from Australia. Amidst all this we now have suggestions of making everyone pay absurd amounts of money for a visa. Is Australia's skilled migration program not doing its job?

The implicit suggestion of the Productivity Commission’s investigation and the view of the quarters that support it is that migrants enter Australia and take advantage of all it has to offer namely its well-developed health and education facilities, and infrastructure and therefore they should pay for that privilege.

Radio reports even had some suggesting that migration agents be allowed to facilitate loans for visa applicants so that they can make the application.

How exactly does all this help attract the best and the brightest, to support the Australian economy over the long term?