Cultural exchange isn’t the point though. The 88 day extension is because there is a long term decrease in the numbers of people living in country towns or travelling workers in the country to fill these seasonal roles.

This is in part the agricultural industries own fault for allowing increasingly large tracts of land to be bought by less farmers, or farming companies. I would say, its not all their fault because as a society we’ve allowed the ‘business efficiency’ decisions, only chasing lower costs/higher margins = always better, to drive the direction of business in this country.

As an example of how this has affected farming in particular, its meant banks have removed more staff who can assess the viability of an ongoing farm on its merits as an ongoing agricutural venture, and replaced them with more staff who are trained to look at the farm as a basket of assets and the projected revenues rendered from those assets. This model, like in many industries, has made banks far more risk averse to lending to farmers, leading to more farmers selling and moving on, unable to cover cash flow problems. This had the flow on effect of detaching that farmer’s whole family from that land and local area. Those families end up moving their lives to the coasts and the cities away from other farmers in the area who might’ve had the opportunity to employ these family members seasonally on their farms. Now we’ve reached a stage where the commercial farming corporations are seen as the safer option for lending for too many banks, so even fewer farming families are able to carry on, on the land. These corporate farms are less connected with the towns and land again, which will negative effects on the land, as well as increasing pressure on governments to import more labour who are willing to work for less money and no ongoing stake in the businesses. The agcorps have little stake in the land or towns beyond maintaining a decent return, and the towns and new farmers have little ongoing stake in the agcorps so can be less attentive to the longterm needs of the farm.

And this all began because some guy called Milton Friedman couldn’t accept he got a few things wrong in an economics book he could never stop re-editing. The inefficient outcomes of ‘business efficiency’ decision making are being accepted, but the financial system doesn’t accept a different method of assessment yet.

I went off on a fair tangent here, i suppose I ended up only somewhat relating back to your comment.