Michael Ferguson (Bass, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is addressed to the Treasurer. Treasurer, would you outline for the House the results of the September labour force survey? Secondly, what does the strength of the labour market indicate about the importance of workplace flexibility in containing inflation?

Peter Costello (Higgins, Liberal Party, Treasurer) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the honourable member for Bass for his question. I can inform him that the labour force figures released today for the month of September show that in the month of September 31,400 new jobs were created. That is about 1,000 jobs a day throughout the whole of the month. As a consequence of that, unemployment has fallen to a 30-year low of 4.8 per cent. In the electorate of Bass the unemployment rate today is 5.5 per cent, compared with the unemployment rate in 1996 of 9.9 per cent. So it is nearly half of what it was 10 years ago.

The good news is that over the last year there have been 271,000 new jobs created in Australia, and under this government, since March 1996, there have been 1,966,000 new jobs created in Australia. The other good news is that the participation rate—that is, the rate of people of the working age population who are in work or looking for work—has now reached an all-time record high of 65.1 per cent. In other words, there is a record participation rate, a record number of jobs and a 30-year low in unemployment.

Since the Work Choices reforms were introduced in March of this year 205,000 new jobs have been added to the Australian economy. We do not say that they were all added as a consequence of Work Choices because obviously economic growth has a lot to do with this. But we can say one thing: the claim by the Labor Party that Work Choices would be job destroying—that was the claim—was wrong for 205,000 reasons since March of this year.

The strength of the labour market also underpins the need for flexibility. Nothing would be more damaging—where you have a 30-year low, where you have some parts of the economy that are very strong on the back of mining and commodity prices and where you have other parts of the economy which are being brutally kicked around by drought, such as the agricultural area—and nothing could be more wrong than to have wage fixing that took wage settlements out of profitable areas of the economy and applied them back to those areas of the economy which are not doing so well.

Nothing could be more destroying in terms of inflation, in terms of economic growth and in terms of jobs. That is why Labor is so wrong in opposing Work Choices. It is why the ACTU is so wrong in putting forward its orders for battle for the ALP today of getting rid of AWAs and returning to centralised wage fixation. That is what gave us the problem back in the early eighties and the early nineties. One of the reasons we have been able to maintain this in a low-inflation economy is that we have much better industrial relations, and nothing threatens that more than the Australian Labor Party.