Craig Kelly (Hughes, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

The member for Grayndler says it is not true. I have a copy of the ABS figures here. I am happy to give them to the member for Grayndler so he can see the numbers. The ABS figures show that the unemployment queues of this country lengthened by 200,000 under the previous Labor Party. Let us compare that to the previous Howard and Costello coalition government. They inherited $96 billion worth of debt and deficit. They paid back that $96 billion of debt and $54 billion worth of interest along the way, they put $40 billion in the Future Fund and they had a surplus of $20 billion. On top of that they reduced the unemployment queues of this country by 300,000 people. The previous Labor government increased those same queues by another 200,000. Most affected were small businesses. The numbers do not lie—there were 519,000 jobs lost in small business under a Labor government.

It is interesting to dig down into the ABS numbers because of the stories they tell. They show the contrast between New South Wales, which has a coalition government that gets on with the job and allows the private sector to get on with it, and Victoria, which has a Labor government that ties things up in red tape, breaks contracts and lets the CFMEU and their union mates run over the place. Let us have a look at what the ABS numbers for the last two months show for New South Wales and Victoria. In the past two months New South Wales created 35,200 jobs. That was a pretty good effort from the coalition government in New South Wales. How about our friends down in Victoria, where the Labor government is in charge? How many jobs did they create? Not even one. There has been a decline of 1,400 jobs. So New South Wales has put on 35,200 jobs and Victoria, where we have a Labor government in control, has lost 1,400 jobs.

History repeats over and over again. Whenever you have a Labor government in control, which thinks it is big government and big unions that control jobs, we see jobs lost. Whenever we have a coalition government, which understands that government does not create jobs but it is small business and entrepreneurs that create jobs, we see job creation in this country happen, and that is what we are seeing now. This government is well on the way to creating one million new jobs. We are going to work hard. We are going to get the unemployment numbers down and continue to decrease the unemployment queues of this country.

Debate adjourned.

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