Peter Whish-Wilson (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I was just saying before that I did enjoy my two sessions working remotely from my Launceston office, but I will say that it is good to be back in the chamber for many reasons. My question to the government is: where is the evidence that this $4 billion job scheme will work? Where is the evidence that this is going to employ lots of young Australians? I'll tell you where the evidence is that it doesn't work. I'd like to take senators in the chamber back in time, on a little journey to August 2013. I have a document here in front of me called 'The coalition's policy to boost employment in Tasmania'. It's from August 2013. On the front is a picture of Mr Malcolm Turnbull—who I understand is on the Four Corners TV program as I speak—Mr Robb, Joe Hockey, I think, Tony Abbott and, I think, Julie Bishop. I'm not sure who the other fellow is. I've forgotten who it is already. They were the senior Liberal leadership team.

This policy, I remember, came with great fanfare in my home state. Let me tell you what it is, because this is going to interest everybody here. It was called a Tasmanian jobs program and it was a job hiring credit to any business that wanted to hire a young, unemployed Tasmanian. They wanted these young, unemployed Tasmanians to be hired quickly. This is where it gets quite interesting. They called it 'a trial jobs program for Tasmania to turbocharge a lacklustre jobs market'. A 'trial'—I will come back to that in a minute because it is actually quite important. This scheme was actually more generous. It offered a one-off payment of $3,250 to any Tasmanian business that hired an unemployed jobseeker. That worked out to about $250 a fortnight for a total subsidy of $3,250. It was expected—and they were very clear about this—that it would be first in, first served for Tasmanian businesses. There were 2,000 initial positions made available. I remember Senator Abetz speaking in the media saying that they believed it would be so successful—and he can come in and correct the record if I'm wrong; it was a fair while ago—it could employ tens of thousands of people. It was a trial for the rest of the country,incidentally.

You might be interested to know how the trial went , because it was designed to be assessed following the pilot program—the study. It was assessed by the Australian government Department of Employment in June 2017, two years after it expired , and the department said that , overall, over the two years that this program ran, there were 363 commencements. That was 18.2 per cent of the expected job placements. So, by any measure —and I haven't even got to the good bit yet— it was a failure. Eighty p er cent was unused; l ess than 20 per cent of it was used by Tasmanian businesses. It was actually proportionately lower than the take - up of another wage subsidy prior to that , called the restart subsidy , which also had a very poor success rate . It had previously failed in Tasmania.

Now, this is the interesting bit . In addition, most employers, 66.7 per cent, which is almost exactly two-thirds , who employed a jobseeker through this program reported that the Tasmanian job program incentive had not —I repeat: had not — influenced their decision to hire the jobseek er at all, e mploying what economists call a high level of dead weight loss. These were , to quote the report, in 'the largest employing and growth industries in Tasmania', such as construction , the retail trade, accommodation and food services. In other words, these businesses were going to hire tho se workers anyway , and the government just gave them a nice taxpayer subsidy for what they were already going to do. I'm not going to dispute that any single new job created is important , because it is.

So, on these measures — I ' ve got to do some quick maths on the hop here ; what's a third of 363? — 120 or so new jobs were created in Tasmania because of this scheme. The political spin that this created was immense. I don't ever really remember seeing it being reported on as a failure, but I thought I'd go back and check , because at the time I was on the public record in this place and in the Tasmanian media saying it would fail , and the reason is simple : businesses don't go out and hire an extra worker for a couple of hundred bucks a week. Even though this scheme is slightly different in it s construction, a worker still has to work for a minimum of 20 hours a week , so you ' d be looking at paying them at least 500 bucks a week to get the 200 bucks . Multiply that by 52 weeks and a business has to come up with at least $26,000 to take on an extra employee —plus super, plus, plus. As we know, for businesses it's a lot of work to take on employees . I run a small business myself . My wife and her partners employ 25 Tasmanians. They know what it 's like to hire new employees. It ' s not an easy thing. It's something you do i f you expect the demand for your services or your business to cover the costs of that additional employee. So, as I said at the time, why would any business in a difficult time go out and hire these employees, knowing they'd have to pay $20,000, $30,000, $40,000 or more — most likely a lot more than that — just to get a couple of thousand bucks? It did not make sense and it still doesn't make sense. And this is almost identical.

W hat I would like to know from the government , and this is perhaps a good question for the minister in the committee stage , is that, if the Tasmanian jobs program was designed to be a trial , and the report from the department was scathing, w hy have we seen it re-created during the COVID crisis ?

It didn't work. It literally didn't work. The department scrambled to find some minor positive things about it, and even they were hedged in terms of, 'Well, you know, there's no real evidence that even that worked.' I accept, and the Greens accept, that this is a difficult period. I suspect things are going to get a lot worse in six or 12 months time. This is a form of stimulus. The Greens supported constructive amendments and changes to JobSeeker. My colleague in here Senator Siewert has campaigned for decades to try and get an increase to the previous Newstart allowance or the JobSeeker allowance. In fact, I would argue that the Greens were the first out there to say that we needed a living wage during the COVID crisis; I would be happy to spar with anyone on that publicly. I've got the tweets and I've got all the information. We called for a living wage early in the piece, because we thought it was important. It was backed by business. It was backed by the unions. It made sense. We've never been through a period like this.

We accept that we need to do what we can to employ young Australians. My son, like a lot of young Australians, has been impacted by COVID. He started working at Target a couple of months ago, and he's been a new, improved kid since he got a job. So I understand how important it is to get young people into work; I really do. This is not the way to do it. This is a mirage that just offers false hope and all the political BS that goes with it. If we really wanted to see jobs for young Australians we would employ them in direct government programs, in areas that not just employ young people but give them skills and solve problems at the same time.

I met recently with agricultural stakeholders—and this is something you would be interested in, Acting Deputy President Sterle, given your longstanding interest in the rural and regional affairs committee—who tell me there are thousands, if not tens of thousands, of jobs for Australians out there in regenerative agriculture and so on and so forth. They are also talking about setting up government funded programs to employ young Australians to look after the bush, to help farmers, to restore our soils and so on and so forth. There are so many opportunities, if we would think outside the box. We can solve problems at the same time we can find work for young Australians—meaningful work that offers them long-term careers. There is a huge future in something like regenerative agriculture, and that's just one example.

These are green led recoveries, and the word 'green' is used internationally; it's not a Greens party thing. It's talking about creating a value for communities, a value for the environment and a value for ecosystem services. In my home state of Tasmania there are incredibly important jobs waiting to be funded in fire management, for example. In recent weeks I was down in our World Heritage areas camping—some of the most stunning areas you'll ever see on the face of planet. It still surprises me that after nearly 20 years in Tassie I still haven't been to a lot of these places. While they were magnificent and I enjoyed them, the scars from climate wildfires are everywhere to see. Some of these forests have never seen fire in their thousands of years, but they have in the last five years. Things are changing. There is an enormous amount of work—constructive, meaningful work—in managing that land. We earn good income off that land, because millions of people every year come to Tasmania to see what is special about my state—that is, its wild, magnificent country. It is rare, and people will pay for it. There's more work in looking after that bush than there is in chopping it down, let me tell you. There are so many opportunities, and those are just a few.

I know my colleague Senator Faruqi has spoken at length about many of the other issues we have with this piece of legislation, but I just wanted to raise a point in this debate: where is the evidence that giving $4 billion to corporations will employ 10, 20 or even a thousand or 5,000 young Australians? Economic theory tells you that the businesses most likely to take up this subsidy would have employed them anyway—in other words, you are giving a handout to corporations. Many of them are big corporations, because small businesses won't go near this. They just won't. Right now, they have no certainty in their forward planning. In corporations law, it is enshrined that businesses must maximise the present value of future cashflows. That sounds like a technical term, but what that means is they need to make a risk based decision on what their future profits are going to be. I hate to say it, but I agree with what Senator Hanson said tonight: it is a very uncertain time and in uncertain times small businesses, especially, pull in their belts. Big businesses have more leeway but they will see this and go, 'Great, I was going to open a new McDonald's store anyway,' or whatever it happens to be, 'I'm going to take this.' They would have done it anyway. This is corporate welfare. I know my colleagues have spoken about this, so I won't go into it in any more detail, but I challenge the government to put up their evidence on why these wage schemes work.

I hope we get some sensible amendments to this to, at least, protect young workers should they go into these schemes. I would hate to see someone like my son lose his job because of dodgy employers, and I'm sure everybody in here would agree with that. So those safeguards are going to be very important, and it's certainly going to be important to get the Greens' support for this bill. I will look with interest, in the committee stage, to see what the government says about where they got the idea from, where the evidence is that these things have worked and why the pilot study results of the, perhaps now famous, coalition policy to boost employment in Tasmania were not used when they put this $4 billion mirage together to employ young Australians.