A visit to the town of Griffith tells you everything you need to know about Australia's worker shortage crisis.
Peter Ceccato struggles to walk these rows — the soil in his orchard is carpeted with rotten oranges.
Every tree is laden with ripe fruit that's bound to fall, unpicked.
"It's heartbreaking that you have to get up in the morning, you have to face the orchard each day, and you see all this fruit on the ground, all the fruit on the tree, and you think, 'Why am I doing this, to what end?' says Mr Ceccato, general manager of the Super Seasons orchard in the NSW Riverina.
There should have been 200 workers at the vast orchard, picking fruit from its half-a-million citrus trees.
Mr Ceccato found just 20.
The award wage for fruit picking is $26.73 an hour, but Mr Ceccato pays his workers $29.
He says he couldn't find more workers even when he offered $45 an hour.
"Look, it is hard work. There's no denying it. I would not do it. It's very hard. So that would have to be a major factor. But again, if I look throughout our town, we've had businesses closed, takeaway shops or mechanics et cetera, that have had to close down simply because they can't get a workforce. So what hope have we got?"
Mr Ceccato says the worker crisis is affecting the mental health of the region's growers — and his own.
"It gets worse each day, as we see more and more fruit that drops down. I find it difficult to get up in the mornings. I find it very difficult to sleep at night, because you're constantly thinking 'what can I do, how can I try and resolve this issue, not only for this year, but for next year?' You start spiralling downwards into depression."
Australia is in the grip of a chronic worker shortage.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics says there are 470,900 unfilled jobs.
Job vacancies have jumped 40 per cent in 12 months. The number of occupations suffering shortages has almost doubled just this year – and some of the worst affected professions are critical to the nation's health and future, like doctors, nurses, teachers and engineers.
There are complex reasons for the shortages: in some sectors, like agriculture, two years of COVID restrictions prevented overseas workers from coming to Australia, and the availability of other, better-paying jobs has deterred locals from taking hard labouring work.
In teaching and nursing, workload and pay have led to high attrition rates. Wages have deterred childcare workers too, with fully qualified early childhood educators paid less by the hour than casual fruit pickers.
To explore the impact of the worker shortage across Australia, Four Corners is focusing on a place that's emblematic of the national crisis: the NSW town of Griffith. The city of around 27,000 people is a hub for agriculture, industry and services, with a major hospital and schools. Its difficulties illustrate how shortages in one sector flow across the community.
Local GP Dr Thevashangar Vasuthevan is exhausted. He's embarrassed that his desk is littered with reminders of unfinished work – patients to call, specialists to consult, scripts to write.
"If you see my table, it's one of the messiest tables you'll ever see," he says, gesturing at the pile of notes.
"These are all requests I've got to do. At the end of the day, we stay for an hour and a half. I usually go [home at] 7, 7.30[pm], even though we finish our patients at 5.30, 6[pm]. It's a bit of a hard grind for us."
"I have not taken a holiday the last two, three years," Dr Vasuthevan says. "I'm from Sri Lanka, so I have to go back to see mum, who is not well, but I need to find a time when I can go. Sometimes I feel like I am a useless son."
He feels he cannot leave Griffith because the town's need is so acute. The clinic is short three doctors, and the waiting list to see Dr Vasuthevan is six weeks long.
The heavy workload for GPs like Dr Vasuthevan helps explain why the number of medical graduates entering general practice has slumped: from 40 per cent 30 years ago to just 14 per cent now.
"We are busy all these days, not having enough staff, including doctors, nurses, admin staff. We are struggling, really struggling," Dr Vasuthevan says.
The clinic's reception staff spend their days telling patients that there are no available appointments. When Four Corners visited, one 22-year-old receptionist was in tears after being abused by a patient who was angry he couldn't get in to see a doctor.
"It's not uncommon to have one of the girls in here crying," says practice manager Rosie Harriman.
"It's the impact of not having enough GPs on the floor. Definitely, it's just a roll-on effect that affects us all."
Since Four Corners visited the clinic last month, four administrative staff have resigned, citing stress and workload.
The clinic is in the process of hiring a GP from South Africa, but an eight-month visa and accreditation process means that getting help from overseas is a slow process.
There are 319 overseas-trained GPs waiting for their visas to be approved, according to the Department of Home Affairs.
Stephanie Bell wears the love for her profession on her hand-stitched sleeves: she sews her own nursing tunics out of colourful fabric to brighten the days of her young patients.
But this paediatric nurse isn't sure how much longer she can last in the public hospital system.
"I definitely don't see myself staying at the bedside for more than the next couple of years, if I make it that long," she says.
She works at Griffith Base Hospital, which is short 43 staff from its 490-strong complement.
Ms Bell, who is speaking as a representative of the NSW Nurses and Midwives' Association, says the short-staffed wards mean the nurses don't have time to do their jobs properly.
"When you don't have enough staff to do the job, the job doesn't get done," she says.
"So the extra stuff is what's not being done. You might have been in hospital for a couple of days and you're really looking forward to having a shower today, 'sorry, there's no one to shower you'. If you are a dependent patient, you rely on someone to help you eat your breakfast in the morning, 'sorry, there's no one to help you eat your breakfast'."
Ms Bell says that's dangerous for patients.
"When you know that you only have a set time to do things, when you're understaffed and you're under the pump, you're rushing through these jobs. And the more you rush, the more likely you are to make a mistake and that's just a fact," she says.
She says her colleagues work extra hours and take on double shifts out of concern for their co-workers and their patients. But it's gruelling and unsustainable.
It's a national problem. Retention of nurses in the profession has reached a crisis point. A report by McKinsey consultants published last month revealed one in five nurses plan to leave their role in the next 12 months.
Nurses surveyed said pay was the biggest factor pushing them out of the profession.
One temporary solution to the problem – to bring in overseas-trained workers — is painfully slow. There are almost 3,000 registered nurses waiting to have their visas finalised.
The scale of the visa backlog problem is immense.
Four Corners has discovered that there are still 10,700 temporary skill shortage visas waiting to be processed, and 59,200 permanent skilled visas.
Home Affairs Minister Clare O'Neil says when the Labor government came into office almost five months ago there were over one million visas waiting to be assessed.
The Coalition cut $875 million from the migration budget before the election.
"We have moved resourcing within Home Affairs to make sure that we are properly putting resources into the visa processing area of the department," Ms O'Neil says.
"But in addition to that, we've committed significant additional resources into visa processing. So the human end of this is people have got fruit rotting on trees and things aren't showing up on supermarket shelves. And we've got nurses working double and triple shifts to help those people. We need to speed up processing times and that's what we're doing."
But why not simply reverse the cut?
"Well, what we're trying to do is make sure that visa processing gets back on track and that is what we are doing," she says.
But despite diverting more resources to the department to get on top of the backlog, there is still a long way to go given thousands of new applications are being lodged every month.
Figures seen by Four Corners show the rate at which temporary skill shortage visas are being processed has reduced the backlog by 1,300 applications over three months, while there were 5,700 more permanent skilled visa applications lodged than cleared in the same period.
In Griffith, the shortages in one sector feed into others. At a local childcare centre, a single extra staff member would open up an extra 85 childcare places across a week – freeing up parents to work and study. Work vehicles are off the road because of delays at a local mechanic. Crucial farming equipment isn't getting built because of a shortage of welders.
And at the fire brigade, the shortage is putting pressure on a small group of on-call firefighters, all of whom have other jobs.
It's a daily struggle for the station's captain, Danielle McKay, who needs to make sure at least four people attend any incident.
"Look, it's tough. Particularly, during the work week when people are supposed to be at work. We're lucky we do have some supportive employers for some of our firefighters that can turn out during the day."
"We can't have all our fire fighters during the day because some employers don't allow it. The ones that do let their fire fighters go out, it's good, it keeps the station ticking over. But it can obviously be disruptive with them going to and from work regularly."
Paul Giovinazzo winds a careful path through an industrial labyrinth of lathes, steel offcuts and welding stations to bring us to an enormous piece of bespoke equipment: a GPS-guided earthmover.
He can't build them quickly enough.
"Our lead times have run out from three to six weeks out to 12 months," he says.
"We get customers calling us and saying, 'Look, I'd like to buy one of your earthmovers', and they'd normally expect us to say, 'Okay, we can do that in three months.' When we tell them 12 months, they just cancel the order. They just look for an alternative."
He doesn't have enough staff to build them. He says the company could hire another 25 employees.
"It's been our biggest problem, or our biggest limiting factor as a business," he says.
"If we get our lead times back to say, 10 weeks, we could probably double the amount of output, and double our turnover."
Collier and Miller tries to hire about eight apprentices a year, although Mr Giovinazzo says that some years they don't even have eight applicants.
It's a problem that has been growing for years. The number of newly qualified tradespeople entering the workforce has plummeted around 30 per cent over the last 10 years.
Paul Giovinazzo says young would-be tradespeople are simply choosing other careers.
"I think universities have done such a good job in getting kids to go to uni, rather than let them get into trades, so our industry's competing with universities to get these kids."
The new government is trying to address the problem with a $1.1 billion boost to vocational training, including an additional 180,000 fee-free TAFE places announced last month.
Collier and Miller tries to make up the shortfall by hiring skilled workers from the Philippines – but Mr Giovinazzo says visa processing times for those workers are now at least nine months. He says the process once took just three months.
Mr Giovinazzo says the stress of the labour shortage keeps him awake at night.
"Often you lie [there] and think about the tough conversation you might have to have with a client the next couple of days about not delivering on time."
Across Griffith, and around the nation, the cost of the worker shortage can be measured not only in missed deadlines and long delays, but in exhaustion and distress.
At the Super Seasons orchard, the row after row of wasted food weighs heavily on Peter Ceccato.
"It's just very difficult to get up in the mornings and see this happening and again, knowing that it can be resolved. We just need a better system," he says.
Credits
- Story by Adam Harvey, Amy Donaldson and Stephanie Zillman
- Photographer: Maddy King
- Digital producer: Laura Gartry and Brigid Andersen
- Drone footage: Ryan Sheridan
