Kevin Andrews (Menzies, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I ask the Attorney-General and Minister for Industrial Relations if he will update the House on how the Morrison government is working with businesses, employer groups and unions to develop reform to create jobs which are critical to driving the Australian economy out of the COVID-19 pandemic?

Christian Porter (Pearce, Liberal Party, Attorney-General) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for his question. The member has seen many events in his time in this House but I'm sure that the event that we now face is extraordinary. He knows that. The task that we will have of regrowing hundreds of thousands of jobs will occupy us and will be the great achievement, if we can manage it, of all of our professional lives and the life of this parliament. There were 600,000 jobs lost in a matter of weeks, there are 1.6 million people now relying on JobSeeker, and JobKeeper is supporting millions more, including those working fewer hours.

As enormous as that task presently is, it could have been so much more challenging had it not been for the stabilising effects of the forward employment that is guaranteed by mega projects, particularly in oil, gas and mining. Where those projects have been successfully constructed or construction has successfully commenced, they have the effect of baking tens of thousands of jobs into the long-run economy and that has this stabilising effect, even in crises like the one that we have just seen. The sheer scale of the jobs growth that these projects can provide is completely awesome. Chevron Australia's Wheatstone natural gas project in WA will create 30,000 direct and indirect jobs out to 2040 and add $180 billion to GDP. Likewise, Woodside's Burrup Hub natural gas project in WA is estimated to support the creation of approximately 4,000 full-time jobs a year over the life of the project, which is 40 years.

These projects are utterly critical to stabilising the effects we've experienced and utterly critical to further job growth, because they bake these jobs into the economy. One of the huge efforts that we must make in growing out of this crisis is asking and answering these questions: How do we attract more of these projects to Australia in the coming years? How do we get them into Australia? How do we get them through banking feasibility stage? And how do we get construction locked in and commenced? It is a very, very competitive market for these projects. If there is any uncertainty in governance structures, contracts, policy, construction costs, then Australia can miss out.

All of the major investors and the major players in these projects say one thing consistently to both sides of this parliament, and that is that one simple improvement to the Fair Work Act could create enormous increases in certainty and very significantly increase Australia's prospects of attracting this type of investment, and that is having enterprise agreements for the life of the project, not limited to four years, when some of these projects go eight, 10, 12 years in construction. All of these major, experienced contributors in this field say that this simple thing can help drive Australia out of the challenge that we now find ourselves in, and that is the fifth working group that we will be working on. (Time expired)