PAUL TURTON, HOST: Pat Conroy is Labor’s Member for Shortland, he’s here with us now to talk us through his objections obviously to this problem.
G’day Pat, how are you going?
PAT CONROY, MEMBER FOR SHORTLAND: Good, and you?
TURTON: Yeah, excellent. So have you heard personally of any elderly workers through your constituents or otherwise that have lost jobs just to have young people rehired in their place?
CONROY: I’ve had people who have approached me, both people who have lost jobs and people who have faced age discrimination because this cuts both ways. It’s not just older workers who are getting replaced, but we are also getting older workers facing discrimination in job interviews because under the JobMaker scheme, if an employer has got two choices to hire, one’s over 35 and one’s under 35 and they might be equally qualified, they’ll get $200 per week for the person under 35. So they’re not going to hire the person over 35. So the age discrimination cuts both against workers in current jobs and it makes it much harder for older Australians to find new jobs.
TURTON: Pat Conroy, is it not the case that every time the Government gets involved there’s some sort of corruption of the market? Not corruption in the deceitful sense, but the whole apple cart is upset.
CONROY: Well no because they could have done a few things to improve this. First off, they could have not made it discriminatory by age and just said that everyone gets the hiring credit if you do this, and secondly they could have put in greater protections to make sure that a small minority of employers don’t do the wrong thing and sack staff. And one of the ways they could have done that is by putting restrictions on how you replace jobs because this only becomes a problem when an employer is able to replace a full-time job with a number of casual jobs or a number of part-time jobs.
So this system could have been designed better if you were going to go ahead with a wage subsidy. And we’ve had these in the past, for example coming out of the early 90’s recession, the Keating Government had a scheme that provided a bounty to put on new workers but again it wasn’t age discriminatory unlike this one.
TURTON: It is important to give young people a leg up though because it becomes a vicious circle. There’s only one way to get experience of course and everyone wants experience.
CONROY: They do and we can’t neglect young people who have lost work or haven’t been able to find work because of the current recession we are in, but equally we shouldn’t be putting other people out of work or ignoring the plight of older people. So unlike 20 years ago where the biggest cohort on JobSeeker or the old Newstart were young people, the biggest cohort on JobSeeker now – the unemployment benefit – are women aged over the age of 45. And the fastest growing group of homeless people in this country are women aged over the age of 50.
So if we are fair dinkum about helping every Australian, we should be doing wage subsidies that benefit all unemployed people and put in place strong protections so that it’s not at the expense of current workers. So this is a just an example of a scheme promising one thing and not delivering and unfortunately we see a bit of that with this Government.
TURTON: Nice to talk to you Pat Conroy, thanks for coming on.
CONROY: Not a problem, have a great afternoon. Take care.