Peter Costello (Higgins, Liberal Party, Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

When it was pointed out that putting men aged 60 on the pension may not solve the whole of the unemployment problem, the member for Lilley said one of the other options that they had was to drop the age pension qualification age to 55 for men, to reclassify everybody over 55 as retired and to put them on the age pension. Can I say nothing would have been a more short-sighted policy, because we now know people are living longer, we now know we want them to engage in the workforce longer and we now want to encourage them to work, because the problem in Australia today is not mass unemployment. Let me make this point to the House: mass unemployment is a Labor outcome. Labor produces mass unemployment. Mass unemployment is not a problem today. Today your problem is going to be more like finding enough workers, because there are enough jobs for people to get in the Australian economy. This government does not believe in reducing the age pension and giving it to 55-year-olds so it can reclassify them out of the unemployment queues; this government believes in getting people real jobs in the real economy. And 1.7 million new jobs have been created under this government because we never gave up on the unemployed, we never accepted Labor’s solution, we never changed the definition and we gave them an opportunity in life, an opportunity they would never have got under the Labor Party.

See this speech in context