The Fair Work Ombudsman is preparing to launch an investigation into claims backpackers employed as fruit pickers in one of the country's biggest food producing regions are being underpaid by labour hire contractors and forced to live in illegal budget accommodation, report the ABC.

According to the news report, the investigation will focus on the Queensland city of Bundaberg where, each year, thousands of travellers spend at least 88 days working on farms along the harvest trail in order to extend their 417 working holiday visas.

Taiwanese backpacker Claire, who goes by her Australian nickname, moved to the city last June to work on a tomato farm.

Speaking to 7.30, Claire claimed to have been significantly underpaid, forced to sleep in a living room with 25 other backpackers, mostly from Korea, and denied rest breaks despite working all day beneath the sun without shelter.

"We just got $7 a day and we needed to spend maybe six hours a day picking tomatoes," she said.

The wage was paid in cash by a labour hire contractor who then charged Claire $125 rent each week to sleep on a mattress on the floor.

"The house is just like a pig live there," she said.

"Very dirty, very messy because everything is black because of the soil.

William, also from Taiwan, claims to have been underpaid while picking fruit at a strawberry farm in Caboolture, north of Brisbane.

"We work maybe six days in one week but we get paid maybe $300 ... it's not much," he said.

William says when the fruit pickers raised concerns, they were quickly dismissed by the labour hire contractor who placed them on the farm.

"They don't want to solve any problem. They just think it's you Asian guys' problem," he said.

The Federal Member for Hinkler, Keith Pitt, who represents the people of Bundaberg, is pushing for legislative changes aimed at driving unscrupulous labour hire contractors out of the horticulture industry.

"It's hard to identify who these people are," he said.

"They effectively close their company overnight, they remove their capital assets, they take the cash and they start up down the road with another company name, effectively doing exactly the same thing."

Mr Pitt recently delivered a speech to Federal Parliament in which he declared "there is a seedy underbelly in the contract labour hire industry in this country".