Scott Morrison (Cook, Liberal Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

I am very happy to provide an update on these matters. As we assembled our policies throughout the course of this pandemic, we were going to throw everything we had at it to ensure we kept Australians in jobs. Every tool we could bring together, we were going to put in place to support jobs in this country. That included the hiring credit, which, as usual, the Leader of the Opposition supported and opposed in the same breath, as he has with pretty much every measure we've been engaged in through the course of the pandemic. The JobMaker hiring credit was one of those measures.

When you put these measures together, I don't care whether it's the JobMaker hiring credit, the boosting apprenticeships scheme, the JobMaker program, the cash flow boost or the JobTrainer program—I don't care which of these programs delivers the result, just so long as the result is achieved. I'll tell you what the result is: 13.1 million people in jobs today, compared to 13 million before the pandemic started. I do note that on the hiring credit, what occurred is that, at the time we put that together, the jobs market over the course of the March quarter actually proved to be much stronger because of myriad measures the government had put in place. There were some 440,000 more people employed in March—that figure has a familiar ring to it, doesn't it?—than we had forecast in the budget. Whichever road we have to take to get people back in jobs, that's what my government's doing.

Mr Rob Mitchell interjecting—

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