Mr PALLAS (Tarneit) — I rise to support the matter of public importance put forward by the member for  Mulgrave, the Leader of the Opposition. In so doing I want to rely on comments made in  this place  previously. On  19 September 2001, the following comments were made:

  This government has provided no  vision,  there  has  been no action and there  have been no results … You can cover your arse,  Premier, but eventually you  are going to take — —

  The DEPUTY SPEAKER — Order! That is unparliamentary language.

I ask the member to rephrase.

  Mr PALLAS— I  am just quoting what the current Premier  of the state said in this place.

  The  DEPUTY SPEAKER — Order!  I  am sorry; I did  not realise the member  was quoting.

  Mr PALLAS— I am relying on Hansard. Once again:

  This government has provided no  vision,  there  has  been no action and there  have been no results … You can cover your arse, Premier, but  eventually you  are going to take a bath, because you have done nothing!

  … What this government has not done is extraordinary.

  How can one Premier do so much nothing?

As I  said,  that  was  said on 19 September 2001.  It  appears  at  page 403 of Hansard. You could not imagine  a person  more qualified to talk about sloth and inaction than the current Premier of this state. Nor could you identify a better demonstration of failure than by simply looking at  what  the statistics tell us about  jobs  in  this  state. Victoria has become the employment  drain  of  the nation.

  Honourable members interjecting.

  Mr  PALLAS—  It would  be sad  if those  opposite considered  that by simply raising the nature of the problem you are doing a disservice to this  state. The greatest disservice  that can  be done  to this  state is  to  pretend that  the problem does not exist.

Victoria has become the employment drain of  the nation, shedding more than 1000 jobs a week  since  the  middle of last  year.  I  am not surprised  that  those opposite do not want to talk about jobs. They did not mention the issue in their budget,  and  it  has  not  been an  issue of  substance until,  faced with  the blistering reality that this  is a crisis  of monumental proportions, they  have had to act.

Victoria shed 27 700 jobs in the six months to the end of February. Victoria has lost more than 10 times the number of jobs lost by New South Wales over the past six months,  when some  2200 jobs  were lost in  that state.  Since April  2011, Victoria has lost 42 000  full-time jobs. To put that in context, 1  in every 50 jobs  in the  Victorian labour force has been lost. That  is a  demonstration of this government’s failure to  even  acknowledge  that there is a problem. Let us not forget that members came into this chamber to debate what is front and centre — a crisis in jobs in this state — and the government did not even want to debate the issue.

We now know  that on this issue  Victoria is facing a grave  situation. Over the past  12 months,  60 000  Victorians simply  gave  up  looking  for work.  If we translated that  loss in  the  active  size  of the  labour market  — that  is, translated  that participation rate into a real jobless rate — the unemployment rate would be 6.7 per cent. If we simply put the people who gave up  looking for work straight back into the  labour force, that is where  we would be: with  6.7 per cent unemployment. We have a failure  to  acknowledge  what is a substantial and growing problem.

Let us compare it to  where we were  in 2009 and  2010 — and  let us not forget that back  then those opposite came into this place and talked about a crisis in jobs.

That crisis in jobs was 200 000  jobs created between 2009 and 2010; and 92  per cent of all the full-time jobs created in Australia in 2010 were created in this state. If  that constituted  an issue  of concern  for the  then members  of the opposition,  now the government —  the people who  consider  it un-Victorian to raise these  issues  as  matters of  consequence  and substance to  occupy  this chamber’s interest — I am not like them.

I  think  the  issue  of  jobs  is,  as  the  Leader  of  the  Opposition  quite appropriately  stated,  an issue that goes to people’s very sense of  worth,  it goes to their appreciation of their circumstances, it goes to their security, to their purpose, to their dignity and to their overall  sense of wellbeing. If the government is not interested in jobs, then it has given up on the aspirations of ordinary Victorians, and that is an indictment upon it.

Almost 50 000 full-time  jobs  have  disappeared  in  Victoria  over the last 12 months, with effectively only 14 000 part-time jobs created. Let  us  not forget that 12 600 jobs were lost across the state last month at a rate of 434 per day. Of the 2.848 million Victorians in work, there are now  less people in work than when  this  government  came  to  government.   If  we  combined  the  level  of unemployment and the  level of underemployment into a single database,  we would have a figure  of  12.7  per  cent  of  the  workforce effectively unemployed or underemployed — that is, looking for more work. That constitutes something like one in eight Victorians who want more work, and whose fault is that?

We will hear from the Treasurer that it is because  of the carbon tax and  it is everybody else’s fault.  This is a government  that aspires to  blame  everybody else for the challenges it  confronts. We know the truth  behind that. This is a government that has failed to inspire  or  indeed  even attend to the day-to-day issues.

Who could forget its job-destroying ports tax — a 15 per cent increase in costs for every exporter in this state. Why is it,  Treasurer,  that  exports dropped? They dropped last month in trade weighted value by almost 30 per cent. Take your responsibility for the things that you — —

  The DEPUTY SPEAKER — Order! The member for Tarneit, through the Chair.

  Mr PALLAS  — I  beg your  pardon, Deputy  Speaker. This  is a government that refuses to take responsibility for  its  failings  and its omissions. Let us not forget that this  is a  government that  has effectively said, ‘We will take $75 million  out of the pockets of Victorians — exporters and  importers —  on the basis that it will pay  for our vision’. What is that vision?  We heard from the Premier  yesterday when he listed  three projects and three projects only. Those projects were Labor projects, so we are funding Labor’s vision.

Whatever  failings  and  shortcomings  may  have  occurred  under  the  previous government, we have to acknowledge  that as humans we all make mistakes, but let us not forget the greatest sin of them all,  the sin of omission from a fiscally flatulent, feckless bunch of phoneys.

As Francis Bacon once said:

  There  is no comparison between that which is lost by not succeeding  and that  which is lost by not trying.

And this government fails even to try. It cannot even  mount a credible argument about what its long-term vision is.  Its vision  is nothing short of a potpourri of stolen  ideas and feckless and useless  excuses about why it is  not to blame for the failings that are confronting the state, the  failings that are directly attributable to this government.

Remember that this  is a  government that  promised —  with a great big ‘policy implemented’ blue stamp all over it — 1000 jobs for the people of Geelong for a feasibility study  in  the  relocation  of  vehicle trade. I am waiting for that because the shipping industry says that will  kill it, the vehicle industry says that will  kill it, and the government went around making promises to the people of Geelong. This was a failed project before it even got  started, because  this is  a  government  of  thought bubbles and major projects zeros. You  have  done nothing, you will fail at nothing because you do nothing — —

  The DEPUTY SPEAKER — Order! The member for Tarneit, through the Chair.

  Mr PALLAS — It will do nothing but sit  around waiting for this government to have a vision and a direction, to make  an investment, to demonstrate some faith in jobs in this state by  growing the state. The construction industry needs it, jobs are at a crisis point, and the government needs to act.

See Tim’s speech in Hansard here.