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At a Mexican restaurant in Cairns, the staff hail from France, Italy, Ireland and Argentina. British workers, once a fixture in the tropical city that serves as a gateway to the Great Barrier Reef, are conspicuously absent. Owner Peter McLeay traces the change to mid-2023, when a free-trade agreement between the United Kingdom and Australia came into force — and quietly rewrote the rules for British backpackers.
Under that deal, British nationals on working-holiday visas were exempted from the requirement that applies to every other nationality: completing at least 88 days of specified regional work — in agriculture, fisheries, tourism or hospitality — before qualifying for a second year in the country. The agreement also raised the eligible age from 30 to 35. The result was a surge in British backpacker visas from 47,200 in 2023–24 to just over 77,000 in 2025–26, according to Australian government data, making Britons nearly a quarter of all 323,000 working-holiday visas issued last year.
Without the incentive to head inland or north, many chose to stay in the cities. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese put it bluntly, saying Brits were gravitating toward “Bondi or Coogee” — Sydney’s celebrated beachside suburbs — rather than filling seasonal labour gaps in remote regions. Dan McConnell, general manager of the Mad Monkey backpacker hostel chain, said the shift was visible at his Cairns property. “Many Brits don’t treat it as a working holiday anymore. It’s more a three-year career break,” he said. “Now French outnumber British three to one.”
Pressure from the regions
The labour shortfall is being felt acutely in Far North Queensland. Cairns restaurateur Fintan Rafferty, who employs about 180 staff across four venues, said only five are currently British. Before the visa rule change, the figure was closer to 25. He described British workers as skilled, flexible and willing — and said the regional work requirement had served both parties well. “One of the great things about the 88-days rule is that it forces people to travel. It’s enriching their experience,” he told the BBC.
At Red Valley Farm in Lakeland, about 200 kilometres north of Cairns, general manager Peter Inderbitzen relies on backpackers for the short, intensive avocado harvest — roughly 25 pickers for a couple of months each year. British applicants have “completely dropped off” since the rule change, he said. “Without those pickers, the avos stay on the tree.”
Tourism Tropical North Queensland chief executive Mark Olsen said the number of young Brits living and working in the region had fallen from a peak of around 20,000 to closer to 11,000. He has been lobbying Albanese in Canberra, arguing that backpackers bring both spending power and the temporary labour that seasonal industries depend on.
Albanese shifts position after Commonwealth meeting
Barely a month ago, Albanese ruled out imposing regional work requirements on British visitors, accepting the exemption as a settled feature of the trade deal. But under sustained pressure from regional businesses, the government’s position has shifted. Last week Albanese met UK counterpart Andy Burnham on the sidelines of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in the Caribbean, where backpacker policy featured alongside artificial intelligence, online gender violence and the AUKUS defence pact.
No immediate announcement followed. Albanese told reporters he had pushed for a change in the rules and that Burnham had been “very constructive about it,” adding: “We’ll work those issues through over coming weeks.” He said the free-trade agreement was not immutable and that tweaks could be made “if there are good policy reasons.”
The National Farmers Federation welcomed the discussions, noting that backpackers fill one in seven farm jobs across Australia, with about 52,000 working-holiday visa holders doing horticultural work each year. But the federation cautioned that the British exemption was only part of a wider labour problem.
Broader visa overhaul adds uncertainty
Of greater concern to agricultural employers are separate proposals announced in September to cut net migration, driven partly by pressure from the right-wing populist One Nation party and the opposition coalition. Those plans would introduce a ballot system for backpackers seeking to extend their stay, capping second-year extensions at 45,000 — down from 57,000 who qualified this year — and limiting third-year stays to just 5,000, compared with 31,000 this year. The federation called the proposed caps “a low blow.” The plans remain under consultation, though immigration officials have already slowed processing for some working-holiday applications and paused them from several countries.
In Cairns, the BBC found most young Britons present were on tourist visas rather than working-holiday ones. Paige Tomlinson, 27, from Barnsley, is an exception: she has been in Cairns for four months, drawn by the relaxed pace and local waterfalls, and said she would support reinstating the regional requirement for British travellers. “If every other country’s got to do it, why should we not?” she said. Ethan Phillips, 23, from Buckinghamshire, was more ambivalent but pragmatic: “I mean I’d rather not do it, but if we have to, it’s only three months — it can’t be that bad.”