Damian Drum (Nicholls, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

On the last speaker's notes: all of those stories are horrendous. They're well and truly noted, but there is nothing that this government has done, in relation to its policies, that has driven any one of those people out of their accommodation and forced them to live in their cars.

The concept of housing that is now seeing prices go through the roof is, purely and simply, a matter of the cost of money in Australia, which has never been this cheap. Australians everywhere are taking advantage of it and trying to get into the market. The market is heated beyond belief. However, this is not because of government policy; it is simply the fact that, through these last two years, we have had record-low interest rates. Money is at its cheapest rate ever, and therefore people are taking this incredible opportunity and they're putting themselves in incredible debt.

A throwback of that is that there is a very diminishing pool of rental houses available.

To throw that into this area here, where that somehow or other this is because of government policy—it's just not true. What this government has done is really give Australians an opportunity to make sure that they can secure the job they want. That's what our policies are doing—driving the private sector, which employs 90 per cent of all Australians. If we as a government can get the private sector to grow, we'll continue to create the pool and the demand for workers, for labour, that we've currently been able to achieve—a 5.2 per cent unemployment rate. We've got to be proud of that.

In my electorate—and I'm sure it's happening in everyone else's electorate—workers are harder to get. Job vacancies are everywhere. Workers are hard to get. Workers now hold the upper hand. Every cafe, every hospitality area, is hiring. Jobs are available. In agriculture jobs are on the land. In mechanics, diesel mechanics, jobs are available. The work that we are doing to try and encourage apprentices into apprenticeships has been incredibly successful. But we've got a lot to do, because at the moment there are so many trades that are finding it very difficult to find apprentices that want to come in. Australians, for whatever reason, do not really want to take on many of the jobs which previously we've been very proud to take.

For painters and decorators there are huge vacancies, as well as in plastering, tiling, roof tiling and plumbing. You look at a whole raft of trades about which you'd normally be incredibly proud to say, 'That is what I do as a profession,' and right at the moment there's a genuine shortage. At the moment, it's looking like the only opportunity we have to fill those shortages so that our Australian businesses can continue to work in a profitable manner, to work in a productive manner, to meet the demands they have with their contracts, is to look at overseas workers. We need to be able to do this. Stopping overseas workers coming in to pick up some of these trades and some of these jobs will penalise the Australian businesses that need them. We wish there was an Australian pool that we could call on to come and do these jobs. We wish there was a whole range of apprentices knocking down the doors of these trades, wanting to get a job, but the reality is they're just not there.

What we're doing is trying to invest in the TAFE systems, trying to encourage a greater relationship between the TAFE colleges and industry so that they're offering the courses that are most relevant in each of the respective areas. This is something that we are very cognisant of—that our TAFEs need a great relationship with industry so that they're offering the most pertinent courses.

But right now we understand it's the private sector that creates jobs for our people. More vacancies create high demand for our workers. As that demand for our workers goes up, wages go up. That is something that we're very aware of. We understand that, if we can keep that unemployment rate down, we will be pushing the wages rates up. (Time expired)

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