Murray Watt (Queensland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Over the last few months, there has been an increasing amount of debate within the community about the need for more jobs in regional Queensland. That is something that, as a senator for Queensland, I've been very vocal about ever since I arrived here a bit over 18 months ago. I've been very pleased that, as Senator Ketter has just mentioned, federal Labor has responded to the needs of regional Queensland by already having committed to a $1 billion manufacturing fund, which will benefit manufacturing in regional Queensland. We have also announced that we would allocate $1 billion to establish a northern Australia tourism infrastructure fund to support new tourism development in northern Australia, which is very important given how important an industry tourism is in that part of the world.

But also for people who are already in jobs—as opposed to how we are going to create new jobs—Labor has been at the forefront of the debate about the need to protect employment security for people in work. Regional Queensland has been suffering for some time now from an economic slump. As well as people being laid off entirely from their work, what we've seen increasingly from employers is a tendency to bring people on in insecure work via labour hire, via casual employment, via contract employment and all sorts of other ways to drive down wages and conditions. So there has been a lot of debate about the need for jobs in regional Queensland.