Agriculture

Australia's growing reliance on temporary migrant labour has fuelled a booming labour hire industry, with contractors sitting between growers and workers, often recruiting, transporting and housing them.

While some operate legally, others prey on vulnerable migrant workers, paying them cash, well below the minimum wage.

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The Modern Slavery Act, introduced in 2018, requires companies with annual revenue above $100 million to file a report each year, identifying the modern slavery risks in their operations and supply chains and what they're doing to address them.

It was designed to encourage transparency and improve corporate behaviour.

Four Corners used data analysis tools to analyse hundreds of annual modern slavery statements from 50 food companies between 2020 and 2025.

One in four contained sections that were more than 80 per cent identical to previous reports.

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Former Australian Competition and Consumer Commission chairman Allan Fels has dedicated a lot of time to the plight of migrant workers. […]

He describes the Modern Slavery Act as a symbolic and tokenistic law. "It's the sort of law you pass when you want to look as if you're concerned about something, but you don't intend anything to happen," he says.

An independent review of the Modern Slavery Act handed to the federal government in 2023 concluded Australia's framework should be strengthened.

"The report spells out what's obvious to regulators like me — that the law was never intended to be associated with any real action. It was just a law you put on the books as a sign of concern, but with no intent to take serious action," he says.

Fifteen years ago, the biggest challenge that faced the Tablelands food bowl was water security.

Now, it’s how far farmers have to send their produce to market, because they have to cover the freight costs to the metro distribution hubs.

“That central point has been moved to further and further away, to a location where there is a lot of consumption, but … regional areas [suffer] because it takes time to get all the way back,” Mr Keevers says.

“We can all grow crops, there’s no fear of that, and we’ve got big producers, and we’ve got small producers.

“But the key is they have to have a home for their goods.

“If they don’t have a home for it, they’ll go broke.”

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Griffith University’s Kimberley Reis, who researches local supply chains and how to make them more resilient, says the current model needs to improve.

“We don’t have a food system model that is based on supporting local and regional economies,” Dr Reis says.

She wants the big supermarkets to bring in local food procurement requirements, where food isn’t just grown locally, it’s also sorted in the region where it is grown.

In other words, “the produce doesn’t leave” the area at any stage.

“So that they [the big supermarkets] are showing good corporate responsibility to support the self-reliance and the resilience of that region,” she says.

But a Coles spokesperson says central distribution points and a national supply chain “is the most effective way for us to deliver value and quality for our customers”, with the same prices for shoppers in the supermarket giant’s city and regional stores.