Ken O'Dowd (Flynn, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I welcome talking on today's MPI. Our government believe that the best form of welfare is a job—that is the basis—and our work as a government is to create jobs. I will go through the list of incentives through which we are encouraging workers back into the workforce.

First, I might just touch on Sunday labour, Sunday work. The opposition are keen to prevent the erosion of Sunday workers' wages, but have they ever thought of the other side—that jobs are destroyed by people not working on Sundays? I have a friend who runs a motel in Emerald. He is at me as soon as I walk into his motel. He says, 'What are you doing about Sunday work? Why should I have to shut up shop on Sundays because I can't afford the wages at the Sunday rates?' He adds that he has plenty of people who want to work but he cannot open his doors because he cannot afford the wages. So there are people, there are men and women, who want to work on a Sunday to help the family budget or for whatever reason, but they are not allowed to. That is job destroying, as far as I am concerned, but I do not hear the opposition talking about that.

I guess Bill Shorten himself ran into this problem at the pie shop in Melbourne, when the lady who owned the business did not have enough staff to serve Bill immediately, which he demanded. That is why he got all tangled up and attacked the lady, who could not serve him quickly enough. Now, that lady probably did not want to work there herself, in her own business, on a Sunday. She probably would rather have been down at the beach. But, no, she had to work to keep the overheads of her business down and so that Bill could have his pie with mushy peas. But Bill did not see it that way. He could only see it with one eye, down a very narrow tunnel. What he needs to come to terms with is why that lady did not have more people working for her in her pie shop.

We plan to give a kick-along in the right direction to lots of industries. For example, if we keep taking fishing grounds off our fishing industry in Queensland, we will be importing not just 80 per cent of fish products, as we do now; we will be importing 100 per cent. There are no threatened species of fish in the Queensland waters. Nothing at all is under threat. So why would you want to close more boundaries? The Reef is healthy. The Gladstone harbour is very healthy. The prawns and the fish out of the Gladstone harbour have never been better—and that is from people who have been fishing and crabbing in that area for the last 80 years.

We want to build dams and weirs that will help our agricultural areas and, of course, help jobs. We do not want to see our power stations close. I have three in my electorate—Stanwell, Callide and Gladstone—and I do not want to see them close. But they would be under threat from Labor and their new emissions plans for if they get into power. If they get into power, heaven help the coal industry, which employs many, many people in many, many well-paying jobs.

We have a program for building roads and bridges—all good stuff. FTAs are bringing overseas students into Australia, and our new Colombo Plan is working really well, giving jobs to our teachers and educators. Agribusiness is getting a real kick-along from our free trade agreements, and that will produce more jobs on the land and in rural areas, where jobs are needed to keep country towns alive and well.

So, it is all good news as long as we stay in power, because we are the people who create jobs. For all those reasons that I do not have time to explain or go through, we are the party for jobs.

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