Joe Hockey (North Sydney, Liberal Party, Minister Assisting the Prime Minister for the Public Service) Share this | Hansard source

It is 7.6 per cent. I am sorry; I find it difficult to remember all 150 electorates. Unemployment is still too high in parts of Australia, such as the Illawarra and Werriwa, yet in the seat of Lindsay unemployment is 4.4 per cent—and I understand Lindsay is an electorate adjoining Werriwa. What I do know is that the unemployment rate, at 4.2 per cent, is at the lowest level since November 1974. Since the government introduced its Work Choices legislation, we have seen a significant surge in the number of small businesses employing Australians, and that has to be linked. Even Saul Eslake, from ANZ—who is not normally seen as a great friend of the government—said on morning radio that the government’s industrial relations reforms must have contributed to the surge of employment.

Over 360,000 new jobs have been created since the government introduced its new workplace relations regime on 27 March last year, and around 95 per cent—I think the Prime Minister told parliament today it was 94 per cent—of those jobs are full time. As the OECD said, prescriptive labour laws are the greatest barrier to entry into the workforce for those most disadvantaged in the community. The OECD were directly referring in many ways to the unfair dismissal laws that the Labor Party introduced, which created a very heavy burden for small business, leading to many small business people saying that for the first time they were dissuaded from employing people with no employment history because the risk of employing those people was far too great. As a former Minister for Small Business and Tourism, I can tell you that is the single biggest issue for small business. The reintroduction of the unfair dismissal laws for small business will be a brace around the neck of the Labor Party in the lead-up to the next election, if they are seeking to gain the support of the small business community, because the small business community hated those laws and they hate any proposal to go back to those laws—and, of course, that is Labor Party policy.

As for the commodity price stimulus, I am happy to have a look at that. Obviously commodity prices are high at the moment. It should not be considered irrelevant that many businesses also hedged their commodity prices so that the flowthrough to businesses, unless they are trading spot, is hedged and not necessarily a true reflection of the actual spot price at the time—they would not claim that the spot price is in fact flowing directly through to their balance sheets if they have hedged their sales. Therefore, you may not necessarily count the massive commodity prices at the moment as directly flowing through to company balance sheets. There may well be intermediaries there that are capturing the benefits of the hedging, and many of them may be located offshore. Who knows? What I do know is that there is a significant stimulus out there for employment growth and it is called a strong economy. That is flowing right through the country.

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