Features | Economy | Southeast Asia

Trouble in Shangri-La? Why Bruneians Are Going to Australia for Illegal Migrant Work

Unemployed Bruneians are using Australian tourist visas to work as fruit pickers.

A Royal Brunei Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner in Melbourne, Australia, Feb. 22, 2024.

To the outside world, Brunei, the tiny Southeast Asian monarchy, looks like a Shangri-La. The country, with a population of less than half a million, has one of the highest levels of GDP per capita in the world. Its benevolent Sultan has ensured free healthcare and education and highly subsidized food and housing for his subjects.

There is no income tax. Brunei has the highest per capita car ownership in ASEAN – an average of two cars per household – and a high prevalence of foreign domestic workers, locally called “amah,” predominantly hailing from Indonesia and the Philippines.

Given this background, the news of educated Bruneians going to Australia to work illegally on agricultural farms as fruit-pickers was shocking for someone who has worked in Brunei for 10 years.

But a Reddit discussion on Brunei unemployment revealed that something is amiss in the Sultanate. Many unemployed people blamed foreign workers for taking their jobs in the private sector.

For some, the easiest way out was Australia. The Bruneian passport, ranked 19th in the world, opens visa-free or visa-on-arrival access to 163 countries.

The Electronic Travel Authority (ETA) gives a three-month tourist visa for just A$20. Although it is illegal for ETA holders to work, and if caught, the visa can be cancelled, for some desperate Bruneians the risk is worth taking, as A$30-A$50 per hour looks pretty good even after taking travel, board, and lodging into consideration.

Although Australia has a program called the Working Holiday Maker (WHM) scheme, also called backpacker visa, which allows travelers to work during their stay to help finance their holiday, it comes with several caveats. There is generally a six-month limit on working for the same employer. More importantly, the scheme is available only to citizens of more than 40 partner countries and Brunei is not among them. This may explain why some Bruneians are using the ETA as a backdoor route to Australia in search of farm work.

How has the situation come to this pass? One cannot find obvious signs of poverty in Brunei, unlike in many Southeast Asian countries. I have never seen a Bruneian begging on the streets.

The problem is that educated youth are not finding employment in one of the richest countries in the world. It sounds paradoxical. Even more ironic is the fact that the hydrocarbon sector, which brought so much wealth to the country, is also contributing to unemployment. The Dutch Disease is at work in Brunei. When 90 percent of export revenues come from oil and gas, it can stunt the growth of other sectors such as agriculture, tourism, and industry.

A communications consultant, who asked not to be named, said: “The economy is just broken and is too skewed in one direction. Too much emphasis on the hydrocarbon sector has not only shrunk the job market but also made different clusters of the economy stagnant.” She added: “Outside of oil and gas, what do we have? What job opportunities are there?”

Brunei’s 2025 Labor Force Survey, published in July using the International Labor Organization reference population aged 15 and above, showed unemployment rising to 11,800 people, or 5.1 percent, from 4.8 percent in 2024. Brunei’s national headline measure, covering those aged 18 and above, was 5.0 percent. 

Youth unemployment among those aged 15 to 24 stood at 18.4 percent. The gap by sex was stark: 15.3 percent for young men and 23.7 percent for young women. This means nearly one in four young women in the labor force who were seeking work did not find it. 

Time-related underemployment rose from 15,600 to........

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