More than 3000 Australians lost their homes. One of them was 46-year-old Nimbin local Natalie Trigwell. Once the fires passed, Natalie worked to rebuild her life.

"I packed everything in the campervan and headed off berry picking," she told me.

She travelled to Coffs Harbour, home to more than 65 per cent of Australia's lucrative blueberry crop.

"I went down there and found that I was earning $15 to $20 a day," she said.

Alongside hundreds of other fruit pickers in the Coffs Harbour area, Natalie was hired by an exploitative labour hire subcontractor, one of many shameless operators capitalising on farmers' need to find pickers to turn a quick buck.

Even as fires approached the Coffs Coast, her employers didn't care.

"I couldn't see the berries because of smoke," she said. "There was no phone reception, we couldn't get alert messages, and the contractors wouldn't let us leave."

Throughout the year, I collected stories like Natalie's from the Coffs Coast blueberry industry - an industry and location where underpayment of workers is an open secret.

After speaking mainly to working holidaymakers and other migrants workers online for six months, I drove 2000 kilometres from my home office in Adelaide and began visiting beachside backpacker hostels, overcrowded share houses, and even a shipping-container village housing more than 90 Pacific Islander workers.

There, I heard endless stories of flagrant workplace exploitation and mistreatment.

There was the 28-year-old German who was paid $3 an hour one day - and just $6.20 per hour on average over a three-week period with one employer.

There was the Ecuadorian lured onto an isolated farm stay, where she slept in a shed with no bedding and was prohibited from taking bathroom breaks while picking berries.

There was the young Australian from Armidale repeatedly called a "dog" and a "pig" on WhatsApp by an employer simply for asking when her long overdue pay would arrive.

There were the young, sunburnt Brits, Scots and Irish, who were paid so little that they ran through their life savings trying to survive for months on just $10 an hour.

There was the Japanese worker forced into unpaid work, whose interaction with the Fair Work Ombudsman resulted in failure.

There were the Pacific Island workers living in shipping containers that cost the same rental price as a four-bedroom holiday house across the street.

Earlier this month, after we exposed these shocking conditions, both Attorney-General Christian Porter and Agriculture Minister David Littleproud expressed their outrage.

But anger is no substitute for genuine action - particularly when the government has known about the problem for years, and when its recent plans to strengthen wage-theft laws are embedded in an industrial relations bill that will undermine workers' outcomes elsewhere.

In 2019, the Morrison government-commissioned Migrant Workers' Taskforce found that more than 400,000 foreign workers were routinely underpaid in Australia, many of them in horticulture.

Despite this, the government still argues that poor pay for farm workers is the result of just a few bad apples - a rhetorical flex that provides political cover for inaction.

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In reality, the widespread exploitation is the consequence of government apathy, and a policy vacuum that guarantees rogue operators will be drawn into horticulture - tarnishing its reputation, and Australia's, in the process.

Shady labour-hire firms - often masters of exploitation - are still not licensed in most of the country. Many see temporary migrant workers as an opportunity to turn a quick dollar, and remote horticultural communities as the safest place to get away with it.

They know they won't be held accountable because there is barely a cop on the beat. It is estimated that there is just one Fair Work Inspector for every 65,000 workers in Australia.

Instead, vulnerable workers must rely on themselves, their unions, and investigative journalists to seek justice.

Now, the government will only commit to stricter wage-theft laws so long as they are included in its omnibus industrial relations bill.

By incorporating action on wage theft into the same bill that ultimately undermines workers' rights, the government is cynically using action on exploitation as an issue to wedge its political opponents.

If the government's outrage was genuine, its policy response would be, too.

If even the mistreatment of an Australian bushfire victim can't stoke this government into meaningful action on the irrefutable scourge of labour exploitation, perhaps nothing will.