Cory Bernardi (SA, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for Finance and Administration, Senator Minchin. Will the minister inform the Senate of recent indications as to the strength of the Australian economy, and in particular the labour market? Further, will the minister inform the Senate of the steps the government is taking to lock in and maintain Australia’s prosperity through continued economic reform?

Nick Minchin (SA, Liberal Party, Minister for Finance and Administration) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank Senator Bernardi for that very appropriate question. One of the most important responsibilities of any national government is to manage the economy so that it can create and maintain prosperity and it can create job opportunities for its citizens. Today we have seen further evidence of the Howard government’s success in that great endeavour.

The ABS has today revealed that in the month of September the unemployment rate for Australia fell to 4.8 per cent, with 31,400 new jobs created. So, since the beginning of the Work Choices legislation some six months ago, the Australian economy has created no less than 205,000 new jobs. We also have a new record high participation rate of 65.1 per cent. This really is quite an outstanding result and really is vindication of the reforms of the coalition government. Our workplace relations reforms have been aimed very much at just this—creating jobs by getting greater flexibility in the workplace—and our tax and welfare reforms have been aimed at encouraging workforce participation, which is now at a record high.

Of course this great news today on jobs would have been unthinkable when our opponents, the Labor Party, were last in office. When the current Labor leader, Kim Beazley, was employment minister, unemployment exceeded 10 per cent and it was the view of that government and many around it that the days of full employment would never be seen again. In stark contrast to the situation under the previous Labor government, today we have employers who are actively competing for workers. The tightness that we have in the labour market, which is in many ways a great thing and great for workers, does present its own challenges. But again, our government is moving to meet those challenges.

Today, Prime Minister Howard outlined an $837 million Skills for the Future package. The package makes a very big investment in improving the basic skills of Australia’s workforce. Most importantly, it adds to the flexibility of the Australian economy by providing support for retraining of adults through mid-career apprenticeships as well as vouchers for adults seeking year 12 or equivalent qualifications. The package creates new engineering places in Australian universities; it helps apprentices gain vital business skills through a new business skills voucher.

As the Treasury paper released today with this package outlines, the real key to managing and maintaining our prosperity is to ensure flexibility in every part of the economy. We have to have an economy that does make the necessary adjustments to the pressures that are brought upon it. We do that by attracting skilled labour into the booming sectors of the economy through higher wages in those sectors, but doing it in such a way that those higher wages do not flow through to every other sector of the economy, which would just cause high inflation leading to the unemployment that we experienced under our predecessors.

That is the reason why Labor’s ideological commitment to centralised, union dominated pattern bargaining would be the greatest threat imaginable to Australia’s prosperity. We have to maintain economic reform to maintain that prosperity. We ask the Labor Party to join us in that quest, but all we get is opposition, and today we saw it again. They cannot even bring themselves to reform broadcasting laws in this country which are 20 years old and out of date. But, through the Howard government, we have managed those reforms and we are setting this economy up to maintain and lock in prosperity for our children and their children.