Andrew Laming (Bowman, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is great to have the two docs talking about job creation—specialist docs at that, but whether they are experts on job creation is another matter! I think it is fair to say that both sides of politics have taken this area of jobs very seriously. Both have reasonably good claim to have negotiated tough periods. The GFC was a significant test on any Australian administration and the results were reasonably good, although there is some debate about how that was achieved. Even now we have even more significant but more subtle challenges for the economy.

If there is one thing to remember in a debate about jobs, it is that you cannot ever afford to clear the larder of surplus for investment in the economy when you think things are really desperate and dire because, sure enough, five to 10 years later there will be other challenges. We will need to have money in the drawer for those needs as well, and for the needs of our children. But that is a debate for another day.

Today I want to make two or three points about jobs. It is an important issue and I know a lot of people will be listening to this debate, and I congratulate the member for bringing this motion today. The first point is the sense that there is a bit of a jihad against part-time work. I think that is quite unfair. Secondly, we need to remember that in absolute terms Australia, even by OECD measures, is performing very well. But the member has chosen specific measures that are relative and show that Australia is not competing as well in job creation as some other countries. But, remember, that many of those are coming back from a far larger fall post-GFC and now look relatively good in their movement. We accept that. But it is always tempting in these debates to just chop and change and top and tail the element that suits your purposes and your numbers. But over a longer period Australia's low unemployment rates, though concerning youth unemployment rates, are still the envy of most of the OECD.

With respect to the speaker on the other side if there were to be really good comparison it should be with Canada, and equivalently-sized, resource-based economy. I will pause and look at Canada for a moment, which, under a left-wing government is genuinely struggling with unemployment—this year ticking off at seven per cent. That represents hundreds of thousands of Canadians, who would probably be engaged in work if they were living in an Australian system. Canada has genuine problems with youth unemployment, with an almost equivalent economy to Australia, where we are rolling along in the mid-5s. The story post-GFC is really how a resource economy like Australia lost so much—and here is a member who knows exactly what we have been through. No, we did not raise the coffers to solve this commodity crisis problem. But the OECD stepped forward and said, 'We know that you did not have money in the hopper, because it all went in 2009 and 2010.' They said: 'The fall in commodity price has been a break on wage growth, but it may well have helped to limit job losses and the otherwise rising unemployment that we see in other countries.' So you have this value judgement about whether you really want wage growth or broader employment. Most of us would agree that the social protection in being connected to employment is incredibly important. The OECD talks about non-educated, employed jobseekers—they call them NEETs. Australia is performing better than the OECD on the proportion of our potential workforce that is actually educated and trained and job ready. They agree that we have the most aggressive in the world efforts to connect, through big investments in jobactive services and Work for the Dole. It is worth remembering, and the member should take this back to his electorate, that under the hegemony of Rudd and Gillard Work for the Dole withered and atrophied away to about 15,000 people. That vestigial remnant of Work for the Dole is now systematically being brought back to 10 times that size—150,000 Australians.

I want to pose this last question, which concerns this almost jihadic approach to part-time work. People move between the two. It is way more important to note simply how many hours are worked in the economy, and that has gone up by about 3 million hours or 0.2 per cent, which is very small but steady and trending upwards. Most of that is population, I agree; not much of it is participation, regretfully, and, definitely, we will both agree that not much of it is productivity.

Going back a step on this, we need as many households as possible having at least one person working in some form. So don't begrudge part-time work for the role it plays in the first step back into the workforce, because Australia, the UK and New Zealand have the highest proportion of households that have no-one working at all. That is our common challenge. But part-time work is playing a big role in that. What we are seeing at the moment is that part-time work as a proportion of our economy is from 31 to 32 per cent. We have seen, particularly for males, a fall in full-time work and a move across to part-time work. But the overall hours are increasing. What does that suggest? It suggests a better spread of employment opportunities across the population. The enemy in this debate, we both agree, is households that have no work at all.

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