The A$20 Gamble, Part 1: What Twenty Dollars Reveals

PART 1 OF 3

Twenty Australian dollars pays the service charge for an ETA application, not a work permit. Yet for some unemployed or underemployed young Bruneians, it can resemble the only door still open. This three-part series examines why.

KopiTalk with MHO

The Australian ETA app costs twenty dollars. What that modest charge reveals about the choices some young Bruneians believe remain deserves far more attention.

“An Electronic Travel Authority is not a work visa. You are not allowed to work in Australia on an ETA.” — Australian Home Affairs

The message reached me the way many of these stories do now: a friend forwarding a link past midnight, on a weekend.

What followed was a long, unusually candid public discussion. Contributors identifying themselves as unemployed or underemployed young Bruneians were considering Australia’s Electronic Travel Authority as a back door into paid work.

Fruit picking featured prominently. The jobs described appeared to require no degree, while the employers involved reportedly asked few questions about work rights at the point of hiring.

The discussion ran for days and disagreed with itself in useful ways, with contributors describing the pay, the risks and, repeatedly, why it had come to this.

What Canberra Has Already Said

Start with the part that is not complicated. Australia’s Department of Home Affairs says ETA holders cannot undertake paid work for an Australian employer.

An ETA may be cancelled if its holder works or intends to work. A traveller unable to satisfy border officials that the visit meets ETA conditions may also be refused entry.

Those found working unlawfully may face visa cancellation, detention and removal. These restrictions apply to ETA holders and have existed for years.

What appears to be changing is not the rule, but the willingness of some Bruneians to consider testing it despite the consequences.

There is another danger that received less attention in the discussion. Australian enforcement actions and labour research continue to document migrant exploitation, including underpayment and unlawful hiring.

Agriculture remains a high-risk sector. People without valid work rights are especially exposed because reporting abuse may also reveal their immigration status.

A refusal at the border may be the least damaging outcome. For those drawn into exploitative work, the consequences can extend much further.

What the Thread Actually Said

The discussion supplied detail official channels rarely do: the arithmetic of what this route reportedly costs against what it appears to save.

Contributors said workers without valid passes could be offered less than legally employed staff. For eligible employees, Australian employers generally must contribute 12 per cent superannuation on ordinary earnings.

An employer may evade that obligation in practice. Australian workplace law nevertheless gives migrant workers the same basic rights regardless of status, although enforcing them can still be intimidating and difficult.

Cash paid off the books may mean no tax withholding, payslip or superannuation. That apparent saving may conceal tax and record-keeping breaches while making underpayment considerably harder to prove.

Several contributors placed farm accommodation at A$250 to A$300 a week, deducted from already uncertain pay, and described stays lasting around three months.

I cannot independently verify those figures, and conditions will vary between farms. They should be read as participants’ accounts, not an industry-wide rate.

Even so, the broader mechanics are consistent with documented migrant-worker exploitation in Australia: insecure work, underpayment and fear of reporting abuse.

None of it adds up to a good deal. It offers an explanation: someone considering this route is weighing two forms of insecurity and choosing the one that may pay weekly.

The Numbers Behind the Post

Brunei’s 2025 Labour Force Survey, published in July, is more instructive than any online estimate. Its two population measures need to be read carefully.

Using the International Labour Organization reference population aged 15 and above, unemployment rose to 11,800 people, or 5.1 per cent, from 4.8 per cent in 2024.

Brunei’s national headline measure, covering those aged 18 and above, was 5.0 per cent. The distinction changes the decimal point, not the direction of pressure.

Youth unemployment among those aged 15 to 24 stood at 18.4 per cent. The gap by sex was stark: 15.3 per cent for young men and 23.7 per cent for young women.

That means nearly one in four young women in the labour force who were seeking work did not find it. The survey records the gap but does not explain it.

Time-related underemployment rose from 15,600 to 19,500 people. These were workers who wanted additional hours, worked fewer than 40 hours and were available for more work.

The survey’s composite measure of labour underutilisation, encompassing unemployment, time-related underemployment and the potential labour force, climbed from 13.8 to 16.4 per cent.

The survey also reports median monthly income from employment falling from BND1,000 in 2024 to BND950 in 2025.

Read together, these figures tell more than a story of too few jobs. They show a labour market absorbing more time-related underemployment while median income falls.

That is pressure from both directions at once. The ETA discussion matters because it shows how some young people are responding when neither direction offers security.

Coming Next

Part 2: why Brunei, a country producing thousands of qualified graduates every year, still offers too few graduate-level vacancies, and what the government’s own 2024 Manpower Blueprint says about it.

Editorial illustration. The people depicted are not individuals identified in this report.