E&OE TRANSCRIPT
DOORSTOP INTERVIEW
SPRINGWOOD
THURSDAY, 13 AUGUST 2020
 
SUBJECT: ABS Labour Force.
 
JIM CHALMERS, SHADOW TREASURER: The unemployment rate rose again in July. It's the highest it's been since the 1990s. 16,000 additional Australians became unemployed in July. For the first time, more than a million Australians are officially looking for a job and can't find one.  This is 1,009,400 reasons why the Morrison Government needs to come forward with a plan for jobs. Every day since March on average, something like 2,400 additional Australians have become unemployed. Every day of delay, every day without a jobs plan, means too many Australians are out of work.
 
Even numbers this confronting don't tell the full story. Almost a quarter of a million Australians have given up looking for work since March. These numbers don't even take into account the full consequences of the hard lockdown in Victoria. They don't take into account what many economists expect will happen when tens of billions of dollars of support is withdrawn from the economy at the end of September. These numbers are confronting but they still don't tell the full story. The Government and the Reserve Bank expect things to get worse in the labour market before they get better. The Reserve Bank and the Government both expect up to 400,000 additional Australians to lose their job between now and Christmas. 
 
These are incredibly difficult times during this recession for more than a million Australians officially looking for a job and unable to find one. Australians can't afford a jobless recovery from this recession. Australians can't afford a discarded generation of workers. Australians can't afford to wait until the October Budget to hear a proper plan for jobs from the Morrison Government. The October Budget is far too long for Australians to wait to hear what the Morrison Government intends to do about more than a million Australians unemployed. 
 
What we need here is a Prime Minister as interested in chasing jobs as he is in chasing headlines. What we need here is a Government genuinely focused on saving jobs during this recession and creating jobs in the recovery. We can't have a jobless recovery; we can't have a discarded generation.  We can't have too many people left behind in the recession; we want people to be able to get ahead in the recovery. That requires a comprehensive plan for jobs from the Morrison Government but so far we haven't heard one.
 
Over to you, Steph.
 
JOURNALIST: In terms of the monthly unemployment figure, does that become effectively meaningless during a pandemic like COVID-19?
 
CHALMERS: I think these numbers are incredibly meaningful. More than a million Australians for the first time are officially looking for work and unable to find a job; 16,000 additional unemployed Australians in July alone; on average, 2,400 additional Australians are out of work since the end of March; these are meaningful and confronting numbers. They don't tell the full story, though, of the underemployment and the insecurity in the workplace which existed for some time even before the worst of this pandemic. Behind all of these numbers are stories of people who desperately want to put food on the table for their loved ones, school shoes on their kids, pay the rent or pay off the mortgage. These numbers are very confronting. They're very meaningful for too many Australians. The Morrison Government owes those 1,009,400 Australians who are looking for work and can't find a job, a comprehensive jobs plan. We haven't seen that yet. We need to see it as soon as possible. The October Budget is too long to wait.
 
JOURNALIST: Why do you think these unemployment figures defied expectations in terms of the creation of more jobs than was initially predicted?
 
CHALMERS: Two things about that. First of all, it doesn't capture the impact of the Victorian lockdown, and it doesn't anticipate, of course, the expected consequences of the withdrawal of the Government's support. We need to have that perspective when we're looking at these numbers. But even if the numbers were slightly better than some economists anticipated, that would be cold comfort for more than a million Australians who are looking for a job and can't find one; cold comfort for all of those Australians who've lost their job since this pandemic began and all of those Australians who desperately need but haven't yet got a comprehensive jobs plan from the Morrison Government.
 
JOURNALIST: Should the Government be praised for the fact that there was the creation of more jobs than initially predicted, as Labor has been calling for?
 
CHALMERS: Too many Australians are on the jobless queues. We expect as the economy recovers from this first recession in almost three decades that some jobs will be created, but any objective observer of these numbers would conclude that more than a million Australians looking for a job and unable to find one is much too high. We know that the Government and the Reserve Bank expect up to 400,000 additional Australians to become unemployed between now and Christmas. We know that unemployment will be unacceptably high for unacceptably long. We need to apply that perspective to these numbers which have been released today. Nobody will be celebrating an unemployment rate of 7.5 per cent. Nobody will be celebrating more than a million Australians unemployed. What we need to know from the Morrison Government is not just how grim things are, and are going to get, but what they actually intend to do about it.
 
ENDS