Matt O'Sullivan (WA, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Fisheries and Forestry) Share this | Hansard source

Having just been re-elected for my second term of six years, I've spent a little bit of time—and I'm sure others in this place are in the same boat—pondering about what I've achieved and what needs to be achieved over this term. One of the things—and I know you know me well, Deputy President Brockman—that really drove me to run for parliament in the first place back in 2018-19 was this issue of closing the gap. Those who know me know I spent 10 years working in that space, particularly in the employment area, working to close the gap in employment and see that unemployment rate reduce. My firm belief is that while employment won't change everything, without it nothing will change. If you can increase that economic empowerment and economic independence, not only do you change the life of the individual; indeed, they change it for themselves, their entire families and the community.

Unfortunately, one of my great disappointments—and this isn't a political statement; I'm not pointing fingers at any individual, any party or any situation—is that we haven't seen enough progress in this space, in terms of closing the gap. It's very disheartening. We get the pleasure of a job like we have here in this place but the reality for people at the coalface of dealing with this, for individuals in communities across Australia that are facing the many challenges that are represented by the stats we've seen reported on today, it's very confronting and it's very real.

One of the concerns I've got about the way this government is handling this issue is in the area of economic participation. It's great to see that the economic participation target is somewhat on track; they're saying that 55.7 per cent of people aged 25 to 64 years were employed in 2021. It's good that that's on track, but I question how that is being measured and what's going on behind that statistic. We know the government have made the decision—admittedly, with the support of the Coalition of Peaks and others who have informed this important tracking process—to include participation in, for example, the Remote Jobs and Economic Development Program and the rangers type programs. I don't want to denigrate them, because those programs have a place, but, ultimately, the real measure needs to be whether or not we're getting people participating in an economic space that is independent of government, that is a market job rather than a government directed or government funded job. A lot of the programs and the jobs that are funded through these programs are very dependent on government and, in many cases, are displacing real jobs that exist within the marketplace, in the common labour market.

I'm very concerned that, when we measure things like the Closing the Gap targets, we measure outcomes that really matter and that we measure those in a serious way so we can get people liberated and off their dependence on welfare and government. You could be on a program like this for long enough to get long service leave, being in a welfare-driven, supported program, whereas we really need to be getting people into sustainable jobs that are not dependent on government continually having to prop up those jobs. I don't denigrate the good work that is supported by many of these programs, but if we're limiting ourselves and we're not thinking with the blue sky thinking we need, where we lift our vision for Australia, then I fear we will continue to hold people back and prevent them from having the full benefits of being liberated, from an economic point of view.

Question agreed to.