Mr ANTHONY SMITH (2:38 PM) —My question is to the Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations. Would the minister inform the House of government measures to encourage mature age employment?

Mr ANDREWS (Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations and Minister Assisting the Prime Minister for the Public Service) —I thank the member for Casey for his question and acknowledge the considerable interest which he takes in promoting opportunities for mature age workers in his electorate of Casey. In last year’s budget the government allocated $12.1 million to help mature age work seekers to continue to work and, indeed, made a further substantial commitment in the election platform last year. So the government is making a substantial commitment and providing substantial assistance to employers to assist mature age workers, but can I say that we also need to encourage employers to do more themselves. If one looks at the participation rate for people in Australia aged between 55 and 64, it stands at 53.4 per cent. This compares with the rates, for example, for the United Kingdom, which is at 57.5 per cent; the United States of America, which is at 62.4 per cent; and our nearest neighbour, New Zealand, which is at 66.8 per cent.

Yesterday the government made announcements of awards to four companies under its Mature Age Workers Employer Champion awards. These are companies which have put in place policies not only to retain mature age workers but indeed to recruit older workers. I would like to commend those companies—the Westpac Banking Corporation, Socobell OEM of Spotswood in Melbourne, Aurora Energy in Tasmania and Magnet Mart here in Canberra—for their policies in developing age-friendly workplaces. One of the consequences of the ageing population in Australia will be a contraction in the coming years in the net growth of the Australian work force. Therefore, one of the measures which we are seeking to encourage employers and businesses throughout Australia to adopt is to retain and indeed to regain older workers.

These proposals and this program stand in marked contrast to the program that the Leader of the Opposition employed when he was the Minister for Employment, Education and Training, back in the previous government, and the member for Lilley was the chairman of the special caucus committee on long-term unemployment. Indeed, in May 1993, the then Labor government, with the Leader of the Opposition as the minister for employment, proposed the idea of paying old age pensions to unemployed people from the age of 55 and no longer counting them as part of the work force. So, instead of doing something to assist mature age workers, the policy of the Leader of the Opposition when he was last responsible for employment was simply to give up and to pension off these people from the work force. No wonder he told his biographer subsequently: ‘I lost a lot of ambition and I stopped straining. I thought there was less capacity to achieve in that portfolio than in just about anything that I had.’ Instead of rising to the challenge to assist mature age workers, the Leader of the Opposition squibbed it. We will not do that.