Michael Keenan (Stirling, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations) Share this | Hansard source

The Deputy Prime Minister, the Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations is obviously a very busy woman because she cannot find time to come into this House to discuss Australian jobs. With ‘Kevin 747’, the Prime Minister, jetting off overseas most weeks, the Deputy Prime Minister seems to spend half her time acting as Prime Minister and seems to enjoy it too. She is the Minister for Education overseeing perhaps the most timid revolution in the history of the world. She is the Minister for Social Inclusion. She is the Deputy Prime Minister. She is the minister for enhancing her partner’s curriculum vitae. She is a very busy person.

Of course, amongst all these responsibilities she is also the Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations. Yet you never hear the minister for employment mention jobs. She will talk ad nauseam on workplace regulation. She is never happier than when she is horse-trading with the union movement about what they can and cannot have under their new workplace system. You can get the Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations to wax lyrical about the minutiae of industrial law. Yet on the biggest issue that is facing this country, on the biggest issue that is facing this government, an issue for which she has direct responsibility—Australian jobs—she remains practically mute. This is a minister who has got her priorities seriously wrong. It is as though the government is the captain of the Titanic, they have hit an iceberg, the ship is taking water, people are running for the life rafts, yet the minister for employment is running around fretting about some loose screws in cabin 24B.

I am not sure that the minister for employment actually understands what is going on in the real world. Everywhere I go the issue of job security is raised with me. We consistently have lists in the papers of impending job losses across many different industry sectors in Australia, including industry sectors such as mining that have previously been robust and supported job creation in this country. Every economic forecaster, including the government’s own, points to increasing unemployment. In some cases it is especially alarming: the chief economist at JP Morgan predicts that one million Australians will lose their jobs within the next two years. Regardless of which set of forecasts you believe, it is absolutely clear that unemployment in Australia is going up.

Unemployment is now the No. 1 policy challenge that faces us in this parliament. Yet if you look through the public statements of the Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations you will see that she refuses to address the issue of jobs. In her speeches she rarely talks about jobs or job creation. I brought some examples of her speeches into the House today. If you look through them all, she does not mention jobs once—not in a speech to the House on 14 February on the Skills Australia Bill or in her second reading speech for the first tranche of the government’s workplace relations reform or in speeches outside the parliament. Never does she mention jobs, the most serious issue that is facing this parliament. Quite frankly, at a time when unemployment is on the rise, the minister for employment should think about nothing else than how she would go about creating Australian jobs. She should think about nothing else than how she is going to keep Australians safe in their employment. It should be the subject of her every waking thought. It should be the priority of every policy discussion. Addressing this problem should be the primary aim of the government, yet we have a minister who has too much on her plate to effectively address this issue. The impact of the global financial crisis will obviously complicate this role, but the government must not wash their hands of this problem. We cannot have a government that accepts a challenging international economic climate as an excuse to put more and more Australians out of work. The state of the global economy only makes this issue more pressing.

I might just remind the House of the record of the previous government in this area. In 11 years of coalition government, between March 1996 and November 2007, more than 2.2 million jobs were created. Of these jobs, over 1.2 million were full time and 950,000 were part time. There are currently well over 10.6 million Australians in work, a record high. Over 7.6 million are in full-time employment and three million in part-time employment. In December 1992, under Labor, the unemployment rate peaked at 10.9 per cent, leaving almost one million Australians unemployed.

See this speech in context