Malarndirri McCarthy (NT, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

That's all well and good, but when you consider the lines outside Centrelink, the queues of hundreds if not thousands of Australians who were standing in the Centrelink lines, and who continue to do so, we know that today's ABS labour force figures are incredibly devastating figures. They show that 2.7 million Australian workers have either lost their jobs or had less work in April. That's one in every five Australian workers. So more than half a million Australians have lost their jobs between March and April, pushing the unemployment rate to 6.2 per cent. That equates to around 19,810 jobs lost each day during that period. These are workers and they are families, and they need to put food on the table for their family and for their children. And they're people who are our friends, our relatives and our neighbours, and people in our community. Underemployment rose to a record rate of 13.7 per cent with over 1.8 million Australians underemployed. The number of underemployed Australians was already at a record high well before the pandemic. Labor has been calling on the government to respond to this record underemployment, even prior to COVID-19. That is really important to note. Labor's call to broaden out the JobKeeper package to cover the sectors most affected has just not been listened to.

It was Labor who called for these wage subsidies in the first place. Then we called on the Morrison government to broaden the JobKeeper package to include the 1.1 million casuals who had been with their employer for less than 12 months. If that had been done, if the Morrison government had listened, these figures would be better—and they should be. The unemployment queues are longer than they need to be because many Australian workers have been excluded from the government's JobKeeper program. When we look at the JobKeeper program, the government is still leaving people behind, particularly the most vulnerable people, casual employees and people in whole sectors like the arts and entertainment sector. They aren't even getting the support that they need and the government does need to respond to this. Again, these people are the people behind the statistics—they are our families, they are our friends, they're our relatives, they're our neighbours and they're our community members.

This week was meant to be the budget week. We thought in the new climate we would at least see a response of substance from Treasurer Josh Frydenberg, but that did not happen—no substance, just a few old figures put together. In contrast, Labor is looking towards recovery, and we're looking to how it needs to happen. We are putting forward practical suggestions about JobKeeper and the jobseeker payment. Unemployment and underemployment have been turbocharged by this crisis, but they are not new challenges. The labour market has been weak for some time. What we actually need in this country is a government that has vision beyond day-to-day politics. Now is not the time to play politics. We've been showing bipartisanship, but that doesn't mean remaining silent. We as the party of working people have a responsibility to stand up for all of the wage earners of Australia. And we have been a responsible opposition, making constructive suggestions about the faults in the design of the JobKeeper scheme, just as we made constructive suggestions about unemployment benefits, the partner income test, mutual obligation, supporting students, relief from evictions, child care, telehealth, charities, access to broadband, and the aviation sector. It was the First Nations caucus of the federal Labor Party that pushed for the CDP program to remove the mutual obligation, so that First Nations people did not have to be penalised again and again, in an environment where this pandemic was going to so critically impact those CDP participants—33,000 of them in Australia, predominantly First Nations people. These were constructive suggestions by the Australian Labor Party to encourage the government to move far more quickly and precisely to enable all Australians to have an opportunity to get through this pandemic, and to continue to get through in life, in general, post this pandemic.