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The original was posted on /r/australia by /u/AllSugarAndSalt on 2025-06-12 09:22:52+00:00.
I live in a small and very remote town. There is a local property owner here that hires young female backpackers on a regular basis, and then subjects them to sexual harassment, general verbal abuse, terrible working conditions, and takes 2/3 of the pay they are entitled to for the 'accommodation' he supplies, which takes 'shithole' to whole new levels of shitness. He withholds their pay in order to try and get them to stay as long as possible (eg, "we only do payroll every three weeks, you'll have to stay until then"). Fairwork is beyond useless, and the cops can't do anything because being an awful person isn't actually illegal.
The locals such as myself do what we can to warn them, help them get to the bigger towns if they don't have a car, give them advice, etc, but I'm deeply worried eventually some poor girl is going to be outright sexually assaulted - he seems to be getting worse with each new lass. I've been doing some research to try and help the latest victim, she's distressed but also angry - is there any department that would oversee this?? I must be very naive, because I honestly just always thought if you hired a backpacker for their 88 days, you'd have to register and meet some requirements, but I can't find anything online, it seems that the backpacker just has to get payslips from you and they submit those as proof for the 88 days, the business owner doesn't need to be approved or submit anything???
If anyone knows of anything that might help on how to extract pay from this guy or ideally get him banned somehow from hiring backpackers (which I don't think is possible), I'd really appreciate it. As soon as this backpacker can get out in the next few days, she'll post up on the platform where she got the job to warn people off, but that's a temporary stoppage at best.
The working holiday visa system seems absolutely designed to be exploited by employers, I am staggered this isn't given more oversight by the government.