Sharman Stone (Murray, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Immigration and Citizenship) Share this | Hansard source

It is national. The member opposite thinks we do not have a national crisis in relation to business expectations and putting on staff. Businesses are not looking to put on additional staff. Businesses are putting off staff. Even our miracle mining sector in Western Australia is reducing the number of staff. This, therefore, is a time when we must have extraordinarily good employment services for those who find themselves victims of our economic crisis. It is not the time to play around with ideas which sound okay on the back of an envelope but in reality do not work out for the unemployed.

Let me remind you of some of the innovations that we introduced, such as Welfare to Work, that were world best practice. For example, we introduced work experience where the person on Newstart allowance could go into the workplace and still retain their welfare payments. At no cost to the employer, they could experience that workplace and be trialled. That was extraordinarily important for those employers who said, ‘This individual has been unemployed for 10 years. We are not sure about their capacity.’ We said, ‘Give them a trial and we will pay their workplace insurance and continue supporting them through welfare.’

There was also our relocation pilot. We understood that there were real problems in Australia with the tyranny of distance and with people unemployed, and that was perhaps aggregated on parts of the coast such as Nowra and Coffs Harbour in New South Wales. We put in a special effort to help relocate—completely voluntarily, of course—unemployed individuals from places like Nowra and Coffs Harbour over to Kalgoorlie, Western Australia. This was extraordinarily successful. We paid for travel costs, establishment costs and training on the other side of Australia. I am very sorry to see that this initiative is not being continued by the government. I think you have to look very hard at what we did in government and learn, because we managed to produce world best government employment services. As I said a little while ago, our government services have been praised by the United Nations—the reports are all there—for being innovative, for producing employment outcomes for some of the most disadvantaged and for giving best value for the government dollar in ensuring employment services were delivered to those agencies who did the job.

The coalition achievement figures speak for themselves. Our economic growth averaged 3.5 per cent per year. Full employment increased by 1,177,500, or 18.8 per cent. Part-time employment was up by 863,400, or 41.8 per cent. Female employment went up by 1,040,900, or 28.9 per cent. The female workforce participation rate increased by 3.8 percentage points, to 57.5 per cent—a near record high for workforce participation for women in Australia. Since March 1996 the working age employment rate has also increased by 4.7 percentage points, to over 72 per cent. Not only do we now have an economic crisis on our hands but we have an ageing population. Our demographics in Australia make it imperative that we increase workforce participation. Therefore, I appeal to the government to do better with their proposed employment compliance regime in this bill. I am pleased they are continuing with the evolution of our non-government sector employment service delivery. They would be very unwise to go back to their old CES. I applaud them for, at least, seeing the sense in that. But I beg them to make this compliance regime a trial; otherwise too many lives could be ruined.

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