Ross Vasta (Bonner, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for Workforce Participation. Would the minister update the House on how the Australian government’s Job Network is helping even more Australians to move from welfare to work?

Sharman Stone (Murray, Liberal Party, Minister for Workforce Participation) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Bonner for his question. Of course, Bonner is now experiencing 4.3 per cent unemployment rates—below the national average. That region, in 1996, experienced of course over seven per cent. It is an extraordinary change. It is a fact that, since we were elected in 1996, the John Howard government has helped create over 1.9 million jobs. Under Labor, of course, unemployment peaked at one million people out of work. Just to give you another example, Job Network has placed more people in jobs in the last six months than Labor achieved under their Working Nation policy in the last six years before 1996.

As for debilitating, soul-destroying, long-term unemployment rates, they are now 75 per cent less than when Labor was in office. They peaked under Labor, of course. We have reduced those long-term unemployment rates by 75 per cent. Last week, when the ACTU invited the workers of Australia to go on strike and they walked themselves off into the MCG, if they had looked around at the empty seats they could have done a calculation and said, ‘Labor’s long-term unemployed could have filled the MCG three times over and there would still have been enough long-term unemployed to fill the WACA.’

For parents on pensions in the last 12 months there has been a 40 per cent increase in employment rates. As the PM said a short time ago, when parents on pensions get employment, so do their children. We have managed to break the intergenerational cycles of poverty, when parents on pensions also saw their kids enter unemployment year after year. We have helped kids get jobs. Labor left 600,000 families without a breadwinner. Welfare to Work policies have helped the disabled, the mature aged, Indigenous people, youth and prisoners into work at rates we have never seen before in Australia. They have been extraordinarily successful.

But I am asked what the alternatives are. It is very important to know what the alternatives are for the unemployed who are left in Australia. Labor gave us Working Nation. What was the success rate of Working Nation? Four per cent—four per cent outcomes under Working Nation. And, for each one of those placements, the cost was 10 per cent more than under our Welfare to Work initiatives. Under Working Nation, they put people into mickey mouse courses that disguised the unemployment rate somewhat but which left people unskilled and not job ready. That was significant because, of course, under Labor, school retention rates plummeted, youth unemployment peaked and we lost a generation of tradespeople.

Opposition Members:

Opposition members interjecting—

Sharman Stone (Murray, Liberal Party, Minister for Workforce Participation) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It was appalling—school retention down six per cent. Labor recently put out a thing they have called the Blueprint for Prosperity. This was just last week. Buried within the prosperity blueprint we have the shadow of an employment strategy. Is this a clear, bold enunciation of policy? Is it a fork in the road? Is it a forklift or a pitchfork? Is there a fork in it? No, no forks. In fact, we have, in the blueprint for employment under Labor, a reprint of Working Nation—the failed, appalling Working Nation which the OECD independently evaluated and whose impact, it said, was ‘strongly negative’. So it is very unfortunate that we are no better off under Labor’s blueprint, it would seem. Those who are unemployed, of course, are in a position in Australia now where they can look forward to work and they can enjoy the prosperity of this nation, and our businesses can get on and grow and prosper.

John Howard (Bennelong, Liberal Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mr Speaker, I ask that further questions be placed on the Notice Paper.