Richard Marles (Corio, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

Employment is completely fundamental to our society. It has been accepted throughout our history as a nation that employment, and the living wage that comes from it, is the passport to being able to enjoy all the benefits, services and opportunities that the fantastic Australian community provides. But, for that to be the case, employment needs to be secure. It needs to be appropriately paid. It needs to pay a living wage. We can look at statistics, which are a headline, which often don't tell the whole story.

Small business is a profoundly important part of that equation. Small business, in truth, has been taken for granted by the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison government since the time it came to office. All the original thinking about how to improve the circumstances of small business in this country has emanated from this side of the parliament. But the critical question is making sure that we are getting people, either through small business or through being employed, into a situation where they have secure, well-paid employment which enables them to get a mortgage and which enables them to raise children, to have a family.

The ABS data in terms of unemployment is one question. When we look at the question of underemployment, it has been persistent under this government since before COVID-19 hit. So we have a situation now where there are something like two million Australians who are looking for work in this country. No amount of self-congratulation on the part of the government gets past that very disturbing fact. But perhaps the most critical stat in all of this—the one that doesn't get enough attention and the one that speaks to the way in which our society is failing to give people employment, that passport to the opportunities of Australian society—is what's happening with the long-term unemployed.

Since this government came to power, all the stats in relation to the long-term unemployed have been going the wrong way—all of them. The number of long-term unemployed, no matter which way you look at it, is growing at a rate which can lead to no other conclusion than that we as a society are, in fact, leaving people behind. That is exactly the challenge which this government is failing to address. The number of long-term unemployed hit 245,000 in March of this year. That's up almost 70,000 over the past 12 months. More than half of those who are receiving unemployment benefits now are classified as long-term unemployed. Of the recipients of unemployment benefits, 64 per cent have been on JobSeeker for more than a year. That is the issue.

There is, of course, a critical role for the system to play in getting the short-term unemployed back into work. It's very important. But it's the question of the long-term unemployed, those who the system ultimately is leaving behind, where we need to look at how we are coming up with proposals and coming up with policy which actually makes a difference to that number and starts turning the trajectory of that around, because over the last eight years it has been going in precisely the wrong direction. Whenever this government comes up with a program to try and do something about it, it doesn't cut the mustard.

We were told that JobMaker was going to heroically create 450,000 jobs. The truth is that, nine months down the track, it's fallen 449,000 jobs short of the target. There are only about 1,000 jobs that have been created by that particular wage subsidy program, so it's making no difference at all to the most profound issue which is affecting those who are looking for work in this country—in a sense, the most profound question around the whole way in which we see work in this country. So my question to the minister is this: when will this government actually deliver on real and meaningful change to produce a plan which will deal with long-term unemployment in Australia?

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