Joe Hockey (North Sydney, Liberal Party, Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the honourable member for Macquarie for that question. Each year we trade about $150 billion worth of goods and services with China. They spend $100 billion on our goods and services; we spend $50 billion on their goods and services. So it works in our favour by two to one. The trade agreement that we have with China today is going to make that even better, and it ends up delivering more jobs and better paying jobs, and we welcome that. As the member for Macquarie was telling me a little bit earlier today, Scenic World in her electorate—a number of us have been there over the years—last year had a 36 per cent increase in the number of Chinese visitors, to nearly 155,000 Chinese visitors.

We are doing all of this to create more jobs and better jobs for everyday Australians, and I am very pleased with the data released from the Australian Bureau of Statistics today about the unemployment numbers in Australia. There is still much work to be done, but, even with the volatility that goes from month to month, the fact is that over the last three months, since the 'have a go' budget, nearly 60,000 jobs have been created in Australia. Sixty thousand jobs have been created in Australia in the last three months. How many jobs do you think were created in the last three months after the last Labor budget? Twenty thousand? Ten thousand? Five thousand? One thousand? It was 500—500 jobs in three months after the last budget from the member for Lilley, compared to nearly 60,000 jobs in the three months since our last budget, and the 500 jobs he created ended up as branch members. And do you know what? The workforce participation rate is higher now than it was when the Labor Party left government.

So we are delivering more jobs—more than 300,000 jobs created since we came to government. We are delivering better jobs with higher wages. We are delivering more opportunities with a free trade agreement that is going to open the doors of prosperity to more and more Australians. The only threat to more jobs and better jobs is the Australian Labor Party, and I say again to the Labor Party: get out of the way of the free trade agreement and help us to build a more prosperous Australia.

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