Ed Husic (Chifley, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for the Digital Economy) Share this | Hansard source

As much as this jobs motion tries to say a number of things, it misses three points. Don't listen to the words expressed; note the things that weren't mentioned—three in particular. As much as the coalition likes to talk about the number of jobs created, it doesn't talk about the rate of joblessness. The rate of joblessness under the coalition government, since it was elected in 2013, has hardly budged. It's been at close to six per cent the entire time. We're certainly happy for people to get jobs. We want people to get jobs. But, as much as they talk about the number of jobs created, they don't talk about the rate of joblessness.

The first point is the target they talk about, that they extol, that they said they'd beat—the one million jobs target that they reached. How was that target created? It was the work of dartboard economics, where they just threw a dart at a number to work out what to do. There was no thinking behind this number. There was no thinking and no logic behind the one million figure. The logic—for the benefit of members—was that in the member for Warringah's office, when he was running for Prime Minister, they went, 'Well, this was the rate of job creation under John Howard, so we must be able to do that again.' That was it. Dartboard economics, as I call it, is what drove that. When talking about the number of jobs created, they don't talk about how many people—700,000—have remained jobless for a long period of time. Of those, the bulk are in the jobactive system. The bulk of them are long-term unemployed. They haven't been able to budge them. That's the first thing.

The second thing they don't talk about is the other record that is of deep concern—underemployment. Underemployment is where people want to work more hours but can't, where people don't want to be stuck in casual or part-time work. They want full-time jobs. The ABS is recording record levels—1.1 million—of those people. This is a serious issue for people. I agree that there are some people who want casual and part-time work because it suits their circumstances, but there are a lot of people who do not want that. They don't have a casual commitment to a mortgage. They don't have a part-time commitment to their bills. They want full-time work to be able to make ends meet.

The third thing that you don't hear those opposite talk about is the failings of their jobs programs. The member for Forrest, who moved this motion, bravely spoke about PaTH. Some $1.5 billion has been used to support PaTH and Work for the Dole. PaTH managed to get 5,000 interns in the last year. The target was 30,000, so the success rate of PaTH is just over 17 per cent. Of the people who go through Work for the Dole, 20 per cent to 30 per cent might get a full-time job at the end of it.

If you look at the figures and stats about performance—this is even in the government's papers that have been put out recently as part of the employment services review—about how long mature-age workers are staying outside of work, it's not good at all. Two-thirds of the jobactive case load are long-term unemployed. Half of that case load have been on it for two years. The average length of time the hardest cases spend on jobactive is five years. Research suggests that those people make up the bulk of the long-term unemployed. This is a huge number of people. There is no suggestion, evidence, proof or inkling that the government is going to fix these programs. Instead, all it does is announce new job programs, one after the other, without actually fixing the ones that are supposed to be getting people into work. Again I make the point that, as much as they want to crow about the number of jobs created, the bigger focus in this country is to reduce the number of long-term unemployed, to get that figure of 700,000 unemployed down, to make sure that people are adequately trained for the skills shortages that we know exist and are holding people back, and, instead of the spin, to get the substance required to get people into work.

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