Angus Taylor (Hume, Liberal Party, Assistant Minister for Cities and Digital Transformation) Share this | Hansard source

It is a great pleasure to speak on this matter of public importance on jobs today. I am surprised that Labor has chosen today to talk about jobs. If I were the Labor Party, I would not be talking about jobs at all this week. It is always important when we talk about a topic like this to be thinking about the history. History is a great leveller. It tells us much about how to understand any particular issue.

It is important to remember that in the six years of the last Labor government the Keynesian taps were turned on. There was 4.2 per cent spending growth a year, which is pretty Keynesian by any measure. We have an economist over here, the member for Shortland, who went to a very good university. Unfortunately, they did not learn how to link spending growth to jobs. Despite the fact that there was 4.2 per cent spending growth, we saw the unemployment rate rise from just 4.4 per cent in November 2007 to 5.7 per cent in September 2013.

We heard from the member for Chifley about youth unemployment. Let us look at youth unemployment. For 15- to 24-year-olds the youth unemployment rate rose from 10 per cent to 12.7 per cent over the same six years—that is 13 per cent, which is the number he quoted. We saw 200,000 jobs lost under Labor. The jobless queue grew by 200,000 people. They always look for excuses. That is what you expect from the Labor Party. But in the period when Bill Shorten was the workplace relations minister the number of unemployed people increased by around 72,000. The only job he cares about is his own. From November 2007 till the end of Labor's time in office, 128,800 manufacturing jobs—one in eight manufacturing jobs in this country—disappeared completely. During the two years of Labor's carbon tax 125,000 more Australians joined the unemployment queue.

This is economic vandalism if we have ever seen it. If we want an example of economic vandalism, let us look at the way Labor has looked at the loss of jobs in Victoria at the moment. It is astonishing that only three weeks ago federal Labor deliberately declared its intention to close down thousands of blue-collar jobs.

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