Shayne Neumann (Blair, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

With respect to the member for Wright—commiserations to those two LNP state MPs who did their best to defeat me in the election as well. I want to talk about the Blair jobs summit in my electorate on 10 August, to feed into the government's national Jobs and Skills Summit, to be held here in Canberra in early September, and the employment white paper.

The forum in Blair will bring together people across Ipswich, the Somerset region and the Karana Downs area, including employers, employees, unions, community groups and government agencies, to address shared economic challenges. We've had it pretty tough in the Ipswich and West Moreton region; we've had relentless flooding, COVID and higher-than-average unemployment and underemployment. At the same time, Ipswich is one of the fastest-growing regions in the country, so we need the jobs and infrastructure to sustain that sort of growth. And there are employment opportunities—in biotech, defence industries, meat processing and manufacturing. But we need people to come together; we need people to generate ideas and get them into the jobs forum here in Canberra in September.

We need to drive jobs and growth in our corridor, across the Lockyer Valley, across the Somerset region, across Ipswich—

See this speech in context