Ben Morton (Tangney, Liberal Party, Assistant Minister to the Prime Minister and Cabinet) Share this | Hansard source

The government believes that the best way to address disadvantage and to ensure a fair go for all Australians is to give them the opportunity to get jobs. That's why our priority is jobs. Fourteen thousand and seven hundred Australians got a job in September alone. The Prime Minister said today in question time that the numbers released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics today show that we've had three years of consecutive monthly jobs growth. This is the longest consecutive run of jobs growth in our history. This is a very important fact released today that deserves underlining and acknowledgement in this chamber.

The 5.2 per cent unemployment rate this month is half a percentage point lower than when we came to government. The participation rate is near record high at 66.1 per cent, as more and more Australians are encouraged to enter the labour force. Female workforce participation is also at a record high, and three-quarters of Australians aged 15 to 64 have a job—another record high. The youth unemployment rate, while still too high at 11.7 per cent, is at its lowest rate in the past six months and one percentage point lower than when we came to government. Over 1.4 million jobs have been created since the coalition came to office, and just over 310,000 have been created in the last year. We exceeded our previous commitment of a million new jobs in five years, and we've committed now to create a further 1.25 million jobs over the next five years, including 250,000 jobs for young Australians. We believe that a strong economy is the vehicle that you use to create jobs and address disadvantage.

But the question we have before us today is: what is the purpose of our welfare system? Is it compensation for where someone has found themselves in life, or is it an investment in where they can go? This is the nub of the debate we have before us. Welfare is not a socialist redistribution of wealth. It is not payments to someone to simply set and then forget them. It is an investment in their future. Those policies that we took to the Australian people and that are supported by the Australian people are designed to invest in those people, to give them a future.

One of the areas that's targeted by those opposite is the bill on the drug-testing trial that has recently passed this place and is now going for debate into the Senate. This is a trial that's very important to me personally. I've seen, like many others in this House, the intersection of drugs and welfare and the impact it has on not only the user but their family and their friends. One of the things you won't hear from those opposite is that the trial of the 5,000 participants at the trial sites of Canterbury Bankstown in Sydney, Logan in Queensland and Mandurah in Western Australia is designed to identify those people who need intervention in their lives at a point at which drug taking is affecting their ability to find work. What you don't hear from those opposite is that $10 million worth of support services will be directed to support these people with the intervention they need. We know that you can't get a job if you are bombed out of your brain on drugs. So the first thing that we need to do is help people with drug addiction move away from drug use. This is not just the issue as we see it. It is also how it's seen by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, whose research we know shows that illicit drug use is higher among those Australians without work. What we want to do is give the people that need support the support they need.

What we're also doing is making sure the cashless debit card is working. I visited the trial site in the East Kimberley, and I know it's working. What's very interesting is that the Labor Party were very happy to support these trials when they were in majority Indigenous communities, but, as soon as they were going to be in majority white communities, that support stopped.

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