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

As the gallery dwindles to single figures, we are either doing a fabulous job of boring them or they have decided who has won and they have left. It is a very important topic, unemployment, and I accept that. And, as to youth unemployment, there is never a time that we should not be focusing on it. But, to be honest—and for those just refilling those seats in the gallery and getting us back into double figures again—this is an area where there should be way more agreement between the major parties than there appears to be today.

Youth unemployment is something that every OECD nation struggles with, and typically it just follows how the economy is going. It is generally a reasonable benchmark of economic opportunity. You will remember that, back in 2009 when we had the GFC, youth unemployment just jumped instantly from single figures up to 12 or 13 per cent. At the time, we were not highly critical of the government for that; we knew that that was a temporary and passing jump in unemployment that ultimately would come down—as it did, with mining employment. So, too, when mining, iron ore and coal prices fell in 2013, we saw an instant jump in both general unemployment figures and youth unemployment.

The absence of a counterfactual means that anyone can sit here and chop up the figures however they want and try and come up with a month when it goes up, and complain it is the government's fault; that is usually what oppositions do. But in reality what you actually need is a comparator economy, and probably the best one that we have at our disposal is Canada. It is an economy of roughly the same size, with a typical resource and service mix, similar to Australia's. So let us see how Canada is going. Canada's unemployment, unlike Australia's at 5.7 per cent, is rigidly stuck at 7-plus. And you might say, 'Let's have a look at the blend that the first speaker here referred to, of part-time and full-time work.' Let us assume that part-time work is terrible, as they would make out, and full-time work is the Holy Grail. Over in Canada, of their 140,000 new jobs created just this month, 124,000 were part-time. Let us duck across to Australia's figures, where unemployment fell and overall employment went to nearly 12,000,000 Australians. Our full-time employment rose by 41,000 to 8.blip million, and part-time employment decreased by 31,000 positions. Yet, if you listened to the speakers here on the other side, they would make out that the world was falling apart because all the employment is part-time. There is only one problem with that: the stats are telling you precisely the opposite—that part-time jobs were falling last month and full-time work was increasing.

Let us go back a step. Let us not just stick to that. Let us come back to the Labor Party preoccupation that everything that is part-time is bad—because there is never ever a carer of children or a mother who wants to return to work part-time, is there! The problem with part-time work is: they do not pay union dues. That is the great problem with part-time work. The problem with contractors and part-time and flexible hours is that you cannot rip money out of them for union dues, which is exactly what, for these guys, pays their way—#credit card, #Chinese restaurant. 'If you can't get union dues out of them, it's not a real job'—and that is what underpins this attack today: that casual work is no work at all. The fact that young Australians can have two part-time jobs and then transition to a full-time job and then go back to part-time while they study is of no concern to the Labor Party over here; it is just that it is a full-time unionised job or there is no job at all. Of course, these solo flights of employment policy, from mobs who have basically got a university bachelor degree and moved into advising a federal minister, come from the fact that they have never worked in the private sector. So none of them over there have ever employed anyone. And anyone who has ever worked over there has, basically, been on a public salary.

So let's zoom up to Queensland where we can learn a little about what is going on under a Labor model. With Labor today we discover that their job creation is 80 percent public sector. When Labor gets rid of unemployment they just employ more bureaucrats. That is right. You get a few more pot plants, a couple of executive toys and a little water bubbler over here, and then you fill the desks with public servants. That is the solution to unemployment on the Labor Party side. We have 243,000 bureaucrats in Queensland—13,000 more than there was even before Campbell Newman came along. Let's break the numbers down. No, they are not all doctors and nurses. No, they are not all teachers. Here we go: 8,783 new Queensland public servants; 1,000 of them in health are doctors, nurses and allied health workers. How on earth can you employ that many people in health and not accidentally run into a patient? For goodness sake!

Let's fly across to education. We have 850 new people in education. Two hundred of them are teachers and 400 of them are teacher aides. How do you squeeze another 250 people into Ann Street and public service and education? They are doing what—high intervention programs on the computer for education? For goodness sake, get real! We are trying to employ people in the private sector. You do free trade agreements. The Labor side was an ideas free zone for six years. You signed one free trade agreement. That was Korea. It took you four years to do it. We have done every other one. Jobs come from free trade. That is what we are delivering.

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