On 9 September 2025, AIIA NSW welcomed Lucy Forbes, Senior Policy Officer at the Office of the NSW Anti-Slavery Commissioner. In her remarks, Forbes traced Australia’s long and overlooked history of slavery and indentured labour, before turning to the present-day Pacific Australia Labour Mobility (PALM) scheme. She warned that while the PALM program is designed to meet Australia’s labour shortages and provide economic opportunities for Pacific Island nations, the reality reveals continuities with past exploitative practices. Drawing on her office’s investigations and the work of NSW Anti-Slavery Commissioner James Cockayne, Forbes highlighted the structural vulnerabilities faced by PALM workers and the need for reforms to prevent systemic abuse.
Forbes opened her talk by situating her analysis in Australia’s historical experience of blackbirding. She noted that today, an estimated 41,000 people in Australia live under modern slavery conditions, including 16,000 in New South Wales alone. Forbes argued this underscores that forced labour is not a problem confined to history, but a persistent feature of Australia’s economic landscape. She provided an overview of Australia’s past reliance on coerced Pacific Islander labour. In 1842, following reforms introduced by the NSW Legislative Council, notorious blackbirder Ben Boyd released 192 enslaved people – an early demonstration of how legal changes could shape labour practices.
Yet the decades that followed saw more exploitative patterns emerge. From the 1860s onwards, approximately 50,000 Pacific Islanders were forcibly recruited or deceived into working in Australia, particularly on Queensland sugar farms. (Forbes estimates the real number is much higher but historical data from then is poor.) Known as “sugar slaves,” these men, women, and children were not merely workers, but entire families subjected to separation, exploitation, and harsh conditions. Their mortality rate reached as high as 30% between the 1860s and 1880s. By 1906, the High Court of Australia authorised the deportation of these workers back to the South Sea Islands. Many resisted, protesting and forming alliances with Indigenous communities to campaign for rights and recognition. However, it was not until 1994 that the Australian Government formally recognised Australian South Sea Islanders as a distinct cultural group and acknowledged its complicity in their exploitation.
Turning to the present, Forbes examined the PALM scheme, introduced in 2018 to address labour shortages and strengthen Australia’s ties with Pacific nations. Today, nine Pacific Island countries plus Timor-Leste participate. As of March 2025, there were 31,310 PALM workers in Australia, with 5,000 in NSW alone. Over 1,200 of these are on the long-term stream. The majority work in agriculture, horticulture, and meat processing across rural and regional NSW. Accommodation and travel costs are provided by employers, but Forbes warned that this dependency leaves workers highly vulnerable. Many fall through the cracks of institutional safeguards, facing withheld wages, denial of medical care, psychological coercion, and constant threats of deportation. In 2024, Commissioner James Cockayne travelled across rural and regional NSW to investigate conditions firsthand, work that informed his report presented to the NSW Modern Slavery Committee – notably the only such committee of any parliament in the world.
Forbes stressed that women workers are particularly at risk. Gendered violence, including domestic and sexual abuse, often overlaps with coercion and servitude. In the NSW Riverina region, dozens of women have presented to hospitals with sexually transmitted infections and pregnancies. Far from receiving support, these experiences often compounded trauma. Worse, under PALM regulations, workers who attempt to flee exploitative conditions are classified as having “disengaged” from the scheme – stripping them of protections and workers fear that they are at risk of deportation. Forbes underscored that PALM workers are entitled to safe and fair working conditions but that system flaws in the scheme too often undermine this entitlement.
In her concluding remarks, Forbes identified two key structural reasons why human rights abuses persist in the PALM scheme. First, NSW lacks a licensing scheme for labour hire companies. Without such regulation, there is little accountability for exploitative employers. Workers may be tied to a single employer for up to three years, a contractual structure Forbes argued was a “breeding ground for human rights abuses.” A state-based licensing framework, she suggested, would create both oversight and deterrence.
Second, when PALM workers disengage from their employers, there is little to no systemic support. While community groups in the Riverina and Coffs Harbour, alongside churches and civil society organisations, have stepped in to provide assistance, they have no formal obligation and receive no funding to do so. Instead, professional services – doctors, translators, social workers – need to be properly resourced and trained to provide culturally and trauma-informed support.
Asked about the role of policing, Forbes noted that the Australian Federal Police (AFP) works closely with the Anti-Slavery Commissioner’s office. However, many workers are hesitant to pursue legal action due to fears of deportation, meaning abuses often go unreported. This creates a cycle of impunity in which exploitative employers face few consequences. Asked why there were so few prosecutions of employers for workplace health and safety (WHS) violations, Forbes acknowledged that her office had so far focused primarily on human rights abuses rather than WHS compliance. Yet she noted significant overlaps between the two areas, stressing the need for stronger enforcement and better integration of safety and human rights frameworks.
An audience member asked whether parallels could be drawn between PALM and the Kafala system in the Middle East. Forbes agreed that there are similarities, particularly in the lack of safeguards, employer dominance, and the tying of workers’ visas to their employers. She emphasised the need for more comprehensive enforcement to hold exploitative employers accountable. Another question centred on why workers remain tied to one employer. Forbes explained that employers pay to bring workers to Australia and seek to maximise their return on that investment, often at the workers’ expense. She proposed that PALM workers should be able to move between employers during their time in Australia. This reform, she argued, would not only give workers autonomy and choice but also incentivise employers to improve working conditions to retain staff.
Forbes also spoke of the role of religious organisations and local communities, particularly in rural NSW, which have often provided vital support for disengaged workers. Yet she reiterated that civil society cannot substitute for systemic protections; without a formal framework, these efforts remain ad hoc and insufficient.
In closing, Forbes stressed that without stronger regulation of labour hire, better institutional safeguards, and more robust support structures, modern slavery will persist under the guise of labour mobility. Her address challenges us to confront uncomfortable continuities between Australia’s historical exploitation of Pacific Islanders and contemporary patterns of coercion, asking: are we blackbirders still?
Report by Vanshika Saini, AIIA NSW Intern
