Ken Ticehurst (Dobell, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is addressed to the Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations. Would the minister advise the House of jobs growth since the government changed the workplace relations laws at the end of March? How have these policies boosted jobs growth, and are there any threats to jobs?

Kevin Andrews (Menzies, Liberal Party, Minister Assisting the Prime Minister for the Public Service) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Dobell for his question. I note in answering it that the unemployment rate in Dobell is almost half of what it was in 1996, when it stood at the disastrous level of 11.6 per cent when the Labor Party left government.

Since the introduction of Work Choices we have seen record jobs growth in Australia. A total of 159,000 jobs have been created in Australia from March to July this year. This certainly destroys the claim made by the Labor movement that Work Choices would be a green light for slashing jobs. Indeed, just the opposite has occurred in Australia. In March this year the Secretary of the ACTU, Mr Combet, was asked by John Laws on radio:

You don’t agree that these changes would provide any sort of jobs growth?

Mr Combet replied:

Oh, I can’t see it.

I ask him to take off the blinkers and look at the 159,000 jobs that have been created in Australia in the last few months. And let us put this in context: that is double the number of jobs created in Australia for the same period of last year.

If one takes a 20-year average, if you look at the last 20 years, average job growth in Australia over those same months was just 51,000 jobs. So here we have a trebling of the 20-year average jobs growth from March through to July. Why is this? Partly it is because Australian employers have been freed of one of the monkeys on their back in the past—Labor’s unfair dismissal laws. Creating workplace arrangement which suit the needs of both employers and employees and simplifying the workplace relations system—all of these things—have made it easier for employers to create jobs in Australia.

We have seen massive jobs growth in the last few months. But, on top of that, wages have also continued to grow. Indeed the June 2006 quarter data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics indicates an annual growth rate in wages of 4.1 per cent. So not only has there not been a slashing of jobs as predicted by the labour movement and not only has there not been a driving down of wages as predicted by the labour movement but in fact there has been a massive creation of jobs and a growth in wages in this country, so much so that the unemployment rate has reached a 30-year low of 4.8 per cent and wages are up.

Against this empirical data which is now available for people to assess Work Choices, we still have the Leader of the Opposition running around Australia and saying that he will rip up these laws. What would that do? That would disadvantage hundreds of thousands of Australian workers and their families who have already benefited from these changes over the last few months. If you take one sector of industry alone in Australia, the mining and resources sector, it has been estimated that simply the policy of abolishing Australian workplace agreements would cost $6.4 billion in lost productivity, and of course jobs and wages would equally be at jeopardy under that system. There is only one description for what the Leader of the Opposition wants to do in Australia, and that is economic vandalism. It would kill productivity in Australia and it would place in jeopardy the economic security of hundreds of thousands of Australians.