Simon Birmingham (SA, Liberal Party, Minister for Trade) Share this | Hansard source

The JobMaker hiring credit is an important part of our budget. Our budget outlined incentives to help businesses be encouraged to invest more, to ensure that they could carry back losses, to recognise those under financial pressure this year, and to ensure they can invest and deduct to incentivise the bringing forward of economic activity. And, yes, the hiring credit helps and encourages them to employ more young Australians.

We've done the research about what the impact has been in previous recessions, and we know that youth unemployment took the longest to recover from previous recessions. We know, when we look at the old Newstart data as well, that when young Australians get stuck on unemployment for too long it is much harder to get them off those unemployment benefits. That's why the JobMaker hiring credit is being put in place: to provide that incentive to make sure we don't have undue numbers of young Australians stuck on the unemployment queues any longer than necessary.