Damian Drum (Murray, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is a great opportunity to be able to stand in this place and talk about employment and jobs, especially when the opposition has put the MPI forward. Since the coalition came to office in September 2013, 474,000 jobs have been created, with employment standing at over 11 million in September 2016. Under this government employment has been steadily rising by 1.4 per cent over the last year. Compare that against Labor: in the six years that Labor was in government, the job queues grew by over 200,000 people. In that period, when Bill Shorten was the workplace relations minister, the number of unemployed people rose by 72,000. During the two years in which Labor's carbon tax was in place, they lost 125,000 positions of employment. Labor made it very difficult for people to employ anybody by hitting employers with a $9 billion a year carbon tax, hitting them with a mining tax and abolishing the Australian Building and Construction Commission.

It is also interesting that we have some Labor members who want to talk about how we were somehow party to the demise of the Ford Motor Company. It is a historical record that the Ford Motor Company decided to stop manufacturing in Australia under the Gillard government. It was in May 2013, not long after they had taken a nice handout from Prime Minister Gillard, that they then decided to turn around and stop manufacturing, at the end of Labor's six years. And we all understand that, once one of the three motor vehicle manufacturing companies decided to stop their manufacturing processes, it was always going to flow on and make it much more difficult for Toyota and GM Holden to continue to manufacture in Australia—when you took away so much of the critical mass.

Talking locally about what is important in the seat of Murray, you cannot help but think about what is going on in this House right now in relation to the backpacker tax. We have just heard from the Deputy Prime Minister—

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