House debates

Tuesday, 12 June 2007

Questions without Notice

Employment

2:51 pm

Photo of Bruce ScottBruce Scott (Maranoa, National Party) Share this | | Hansard source

My question is addressed to the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Transport and Regional Services. Would the Deputy Prime Minister inform the House how coalition policies are driving employment growth in regional areas and, in particular, how are they driving growth in my electorate of Maranoa?

Photo of Simon CreanSimon Crean (Hotham, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Trade and Regional Development) Share this | | Hansard source

Mr Crean interjecting

Photo of Mark VaileMark Vaile (Lyne, National Party, Deputy Prime Minister) Share this | | Hansard source

I am pleased that the member for Hotham is looking forward to it. I thank the member for Maranoa for his question. He would be aware that since the coalition government has been in office unemployment in the electorate of Maranoa has fallen from 6.3 per cent to 3.4 per cent. It is actually lower than the national average of 4.2 per cent, so in the electorate of Maranoa they are leading the way. It is as a result of coalition government policies that that has indeed taken place. The overall national level of unemployment at 4.2 per cent is a 33-year low within the Australian economy and something that should be celebrated by all Australians, particularly all those Australians that have got jobs now who did not have them back then. They are the people that have been forgotten by the President of the ACTU, Sharan Burrow, in trying to conceal these fantastic statistics about the Australian economy.

On Sunday I was in the electorate of Maranoa with the member when we announced one of the projects that will continue to strengthen and grow employment opportunities in central-western Queensland. We were at Longreach at the airport where the Qantas Founders Museum has just taken delivery of the 707 that is an historic aircraft in Australian aviation history. At the same time we announced a grant of $6.6 million to the Longreach Shire Council for the upgrade of the airport so that tourism can be further developed off the back of great opportunities like the Qantas Founders Museum—the Longreach Shire Council that today still exists but which Premier Beattie wants to do away with. We will continue to support local government in Queensland as they make their way forward, developing job-creating opportunities in the future, even if the Queensland Labor government wants to make them extinct. I give full credit to the Mayor of Longreach, Pat Tanks, for the way he is leading his council in the fight against forced amalgamations in Queensland and we will continue to support them.

That is just one of the ways we have been trying to assist the development of employment opportunities in regional Australia, in supporting programs like the Sustainable Regions Program. We believe we can continue to drive unemployment down in Australia. We believe we can continue to put the downward pressure on unemployment to find more jobs and make a more flexible labour market.

We know there is one side of politics that does not believe that. I was interested to read a transcript of the Leader of the Opposition on the John Laws program on 26 April. Mind you, it was a transcript that is not available on his website; we had to go looking a little bit further—it has been airbrushed off the website. He was talking about unemployment levels and the fact that if Chinese demand slowed he said it would lead to more normal levels of economic activity. He went on to say, ‘And if that happens you start to return to more normal levels of economic activity, more normal levels of employment and unemployment—well, normal in the sense that it will be higher levels of unemployment and lower levels of employment.’ This is the Leader of the Opposition on air with John Laws talking about what he thinks are more normal levels of unemployment and more normal levels of employment. Now we know that the Australian Labor Party led by the member for Griffith believes that more normal levels of unemployment are probably going to go back up to 11 per cent where they used to be. Is that their description of more normal levels of unemployment? It is not ours. We want to normalise levels of unemployment at 4.2 per cent or lower. That is what the coalition government believes in. We do not believe in seeing unemployment going higher; we want to continue to work in the Australian economy to force unemployment down. We know that the Leader of the Opposition is comfortable and happy to see unemployment normalised at a higher level.