Steven Ciobo (Moncrieff, Liberal Party, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Foreign Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

I take this opportunity to congratulate you, Mr Speaker, on your appointment. Once again we hear the Labor Party making all sorts of charges against the government and making all sorts of claims about how the Chinese FTA is going to be bad for Australian workers and about how Labor are so genuinely concerned about the unemployment rate and about jobs for Australians. Once again with Labor, there is a difference between what they say and what they do. Labor, time and time again, come in here and wring their hands and claim the sky is going to fall in, that the government has sold out Australian workers and that only Labor can be trusted with the future of Aussie workers. In reality, there form is so very different. In reality, the facts never actually back up the hollow rhetoric that we hear from the opposition leader or, more broadly, from the Labor Party.

The fundamental facts prove in a comprehensive way that Labor's form when it comes to looking after Aussie workers is pathetic. Labor's form in government saw the unemployment rate go up, not go down. Labor's form in government saw them preside over the loss of some 200,000 jobs. That was Labor's track record after six years. That is before we even start on the situation that Labor left us with with respect to debt and deficit.

This MPI today is about jobs. That is a measure the coalition is proudly benchmarked against every single day of every single week. Our track record of standing up for Australians—I have news for the Australian Labor Party—is so much better than theirs. Unlike the Labor Party, unlike Bill Shorten when he was in the role of government minister and presided over a loss of 200,000 jobs, the coalition government in the two years or thereabouts since we were elected have presided over 330,000 new jobs.

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