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

Thanks, and, indeed, I'm pleased that Senator Gallacher was listening or at least listening in part to what I was saying. What I was saying was the evidence was clear that a program like JobMaker was necessary. Indeed, that evidence is in the fact that, in targeting a program to younger workers, we can see from the ABS data that jobs for those over 55 have actually increased over time whilst, for those aged between 15 and 34, there was actually a 3.3 per cent decrease between March last year and January this year.

So for those of older age groups—those aged 35 plus—there's been an increase in employment of 1.2 per cent. For those aged over 55, there has been an increase of 2.9 per cent. For those in the JobMaker Hiring Credit target age, there has been a decrease in employment. So this was exactly what the evidence and analysis that Treasury had given to us demonstrated—that there was a genuine risk in this recession, as in past recessions, that youth unemployment would be the last to recover and that you would have younger Australians potentially facing longer periods of time unemployed. That was why we put in place a program targeted precisely to that cohort of individuals and that we did so making sure this program had safeguards in place—because I think I can predict where the supplementaries are likely to go—to make sure that employment had to be additional to existing numbers so there would be safeguards around existing employees but incentives to get young Australians back into jobs.