Australia’s diplomatic performance throughout the Pacific Islands Forum has evoked a colonial arrogance that many hoped was in the past. While Pacific Island states raised understandable concerns about the climate emergency and rising sea levels, Australia’s response was to insist on the removal of references to coal from the official communique.

The deputy PM, Michael McCormack, who was left in charge of the government while Morrison was busy dismissing our neighbours’ concerns in Tuvalu, continued the insults at home.

Attending a business function in Wagga Wagga on Friday, McCormack expressed his annoyance at “people in those sorts of countries pointing the finger at Australia and say we should be shutting down all our resources sector so that, you know, they will continue to survive”.

“They will continue to survive,” he went on, because of “large aid assistance from Australia” and “because many of their workers come here and pick our fruit”.

The comments are breathtaking. They are dismissive of the severity of the threat that climate change poses to people in the Pacific, but they are also wrong and offensive about Pacific Islanders’ involvement in seasonal horticultural labour.

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Referencing the Seasonal Worker Programme, which has since 2012 brought Pacific Islanders to Australia for periods of up to six months to work in the industry’s orchards, fields and packing sheds, the assumption in McCormack’s comments is that the Australian state, and Australian industry, are doing Pacific Islanders a favour.

It’s an assumption that permeates discussion of the scheme, which is badged and promoted as a key plank of Australia’s development intervention in the region. But when we badge Pacific participation in the horticultural workforce as “development”, we obscure what it actually is – work.

Since 2016 I have been conducting research into race and labour relations in the horticultural industry, focused particularly on the fruit-growing region in Shepparton, in north-central Victoria. There, as elsewhere in the country, Pacific seasonal workers form an increasingly large part of the horticultural seasonal workforce, alongside backpackers, refugees and asylum seekers, and workers from a host of other ethnic-minority communities, including settled Pacific Islanders who have lived in the region for over three decades.

I’ve also spent a lot of time talking to farmers. McCormack was right, in part at least, when he alluded to the work and effort that farmers put in to the industry. Farmers do work hard. And many of them, especially small and medium-sized producers, are working hard in climates (pun intended) where corporatisation, drought and shifts in the global economy are making profit margins increasingly thin.

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But any farmer will also tell you that all that hard work means nothing if they cannot get enough workers to pick the fruit at the right time, and with the right degree of skill and care. The Pacific Islanders who come to Australia under the program are not here as an expression of our benevolence, they are here because they are vital to the productivity and profits of the industry.

Under the seasonal workers program, though, and under the justificatory logic of “development”, many are working under conditions that would not pass muster under Australian industrial law. The requirements of the dedicated visa scheme that facilitates their temporary labour migrations are such that workers are effectively tied to a single employer.

The program appears for all intents and purposes to be a new system of indenture, one that echoes the migrations (some coerced, and almost all exploitative) of Pacific Islanders “blackbirded” through the 19th century to work on the cane fields of Queensland and northern New South Wales.

Parallels drawn between the contemporary seasonal workers program and the history of blackbirding are not hyperbolic, as some have suggested. They speak, rather, to the deep inequalities, rooted in colonial histories, that structure Australia’s relationship to the Pacific.

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Some seasonal workers do have positive experiences, and many seek to return. Others, though, encounter unscrupulous labour-hire agents or farmers, or find themselves in conditions where the crops they are tasked with harvesting are poor or small (meaning that the pay they receive, calculated on piece rates, is dramatically reduced).

In these conditions, workers find themselves with little recourse. Where backpackers can, and do, up and leave in search of a better gig, Pacific seasonal workers cannot leave, and face powerful impediments to complaining or speaking out.

Of the dozens of workers I have spoken to and spent time with over the last three years, the overwhelming majority have been intensely fearful of speaking publicly, and critically, about the circumstances of their work. Seasonal workers, hopeful of return in future seasons, fear (and with good reason), that the likely consequence of complaint will be that they are not able to.

Of course, it is true that many Pacific Islanders strongly desire and enthusiastically pursue work through the program. And it is true that many (although certainly not all) can, and do, earn around four times as much picking fruit in Australia as they can working back home.

That these things are true, though, should be a prompt for us to reflect upon the kinds of poverty and inequality that structure Australia’s relationship to the Pacific, and the colonial histories that underpin these. It should not be a cause for self-congratulation.

• Victoria Stead is an anthropologist and senior research fellow at the Alfred Deakin Institute, Deakin University. She researches issues to do with labour and Australia-Pacific relations