Josh Frydenberg (Kooyong, Liberal Party, Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

I never thought I'd see the day when the Labor Party was attacking a program designed to get young people from JobSeeker into work. I never thought I would see the day when the Labor Party were seeking to play politics by pitting young people against senior Australians. He asked me about the JobMaker hiring credit. It is designed to support 450,000 jobs. We have a number of programs designed to support senior Australians who have been out of work and designed to provide incentives of up to $10,000 to employers to take them on. We have those programs in place.

The reality is that last night we announced a series of measures that are going to help grow the economy and get that unemployment rate down from its peak of around eight per cent at the end of this year. You should not see one program in isolation from the comprehensive range of programs. The Prime Minister talked about the bringing forward of tax cuts. Of course we have got $14 billion of infrastructure spending and the loss carry-back measure that is supporting business, as well as the immediate expensing initiative that will support business investment and the productive capacity of our economy. All these measures work in tandem. The Australian economy is a complex ecosystem and our initiatives are working together to do one thing, and that is to create jobs.

The measures that we as a government have taken to date have helped save 700,000 jobs. If the member for Rankin cared to look in detail at the budget statements, he would have seen one sentence which explains exactly why we did what we did in last night's budget, and that is that, without the economic supports that we announced last night, the unemployment rate would be 12 per cent this year and 12 per cent next year. The reality is that COVID-19 has hit the Australian economy and the global economy like no economic shock we have seen before. We've seen 10 per cent of our workforce lose their job or see their working hours reduced to zero. More than half are now back, and the trend is for more to come back over time. The measures we took last night are responsible, they're targeted, they're temporary and they're designed to do one thing: help Australians back to work.

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