Gerard Rennick (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I'm not quite sure if the Labor Party has actually read the details of the JobMaker hiring credit scheme, because there are protections in place. It's very simple: it's not available to an employer if they don't increase the headcount number. If you've got 20 people and you sack somebody and re-employ someone else, you've still only got 20 people. You're not going to go and sack someone and then re-employ them, because you won't get the hiring credit.

For the last 24 hours, Labor has been running around making personal smears against One Nation for voting with us. Pauline has got the intelligence to actually sit down and read the legislation. It wouldn't do Labor any harm to sit down and actually read the legislation for a change, instead of making personal smears and innuendos across all their social media platforms. Maybe if they spent a little more time reading, understanding and applying the law, and less time on indoctrination and intimidation and smearing and making videos on social media, they would understand the legislation.

There have been points made in here today about how casuals aren't entitled to the same rights and privileges as other types of employees. That's because a lot of people choose that type of work—so that they can have flexibility. Let's look at it through the eyes of small business. A lot of small businesses' work and income is volatile. It goes up; it goes down. They need the flexibility to be able to call in staff when they need them and not call in staff when they don't need them. It's this type of rigidity that the Labor Party try and implement in their IR legislation—and it's in the fair work legislation—that gives no flexibility in the workplace to employers. Ask yourselves why employers keep going offshore. It's because of these archaic fair work laws. Ever since the Fair Work Act came in in 2009, the number of people on casual labour has increased because employers won't take on permanent or part-time staff because they know how difficult it is to navigate the fair work system implemented by the Rudd-Gillard government.

This measure, JobMaker, is a $4 billion measure to help people get back to work. It's worth pointing out that, if it wasn't for Daniel Andrews and his catastrophic management of contract tracing and testing, we'd probably have had a lot of these people back to work by June or July, instead of only coming out of it now. We went into COVID in late March and we had got on top of it by late May. We could have contained this to two months. But, no, it's gone on now for over seven months. We've had 10 times the number of deaths than we would have had if we'd fixed this problem in June and the Victorian Premier had actually managed hotel quarantine and contact tracing—but, no, because, when Labor's in charge, you know it's going to be a mess.

So for the Labor Party to come in here and criticise this government, which has been one of the world leaders in reducing case numbers and getting on top of COVID, and in providing income support—I think we've spent about 10 per cent of our GDP in helping people get through this crisis. And what do Labor do? They start playing word games and semantics with numbers, and make out that somehow we're reducing JobSeeker. JobSeeker is still $150 higher than it was this time last year. In case you didn't realise, we've spent hundreds of billions of dollars on keeping people going. That is unsustainable in the long term. It is 'wealth for toil'. We have got to get people back to work. We can't continue to pay people to stay at home. There are employers out there in regional communities who are crying out for labour. And what do the Labor Party want to do? They want to keep these payments going so that we can't get the economy moving again— (Time expired)