Senator BOYCE (Queensland) (20:52): Before he started speaking, I was not aware of what Senator Thistlethwaite's topic was going to be, but I am delighted to support him in any campaign that will produce secure jobs and better futures; I just do not think that the ACTU campaign—which, of course, led our current Prime Minister to put through the vagaries of the current Fair Work Act—is the way to go about it. I too rise to talk about unemployment and underemployment in Australia, particularly in my state of Queensland. It was with some pleasure that at the last budget we finally heard the Treasurer use the term 'patchwork economy'; he apparently could not bring himself to use the term 'two-speed economy', which had been used by everybody except the government for about six months at that stage. We now have something like a multispeed economy. It is very obvious in my home state as well as in Western Australia and throughout Australia that the success of the mining industry is in fact masking some very despairing and desperate situations in parts of Australia which are neither directly involved in the mining industry nor offering services to the mining industry. If you do neither of these things, you are in trouble. The average Australian is not interested anymore in hearing Mr Swan and Ms Gillard discussing the supposed economic paradise which we are currently in, because we are not in any such place. This led me to look not only at the unemployment figure of 5.2 per cent, which was put out recently by the ABS, but also at the facts behind it: the very sluggish non-growth of employment in what this government continues to tell us is one of the economic golden ages. They also keep telling us how clever they were in avoiding the difficulties of the global financial crisis, but employment has not grown for 12 months despite the fact that our mining industries are powering on, sucking employees out of virtually every other field. Clearly employment is falling in many areas, and underemployment continues to be a big risk. I have for some time received the Roy Morgan polling and research figures, which he puts out on unemployment—and more importantly, I think, on underemployment—at about the same time as the ABS figures come out. The Roy Morgan statistics are based on weekly face-to-face interviews over a quarter, and the ones that were used for the quarter covering October 2011 to December 2011 were with 13,106 Australians aged over 14. The ABS, by comparison, do phone interviews to determine their figures. The 5.2 per cent figure at a time of sluggish growth made no sense to me when I considered what I was seeing on the ground and what I was being told all the time by people in manufacturing, in services industries, in tourism and in retail. They were telling me that they were having to shut up shop, reduce their number of staff or reduce their opening hours because they simply did not have the money to keep going as they had been. It was most amusing to hear Senator Thistlethwaite talk about job security and employers being prepared to sacrifice long-term profits for short-term gain. If you can see that you are only going to stay in business for a couple of months, short-term gain is all you have, and Senator Thistlethwaite must be joking if he is suggesting that many of these employers, especially the ones in small business, have the ability to simply tough it out for perhaps months or years waiting for the economic nirvana that the government has conned itself into thinking we have. Every small business employer—indeed, every employer—I know wants to maintain and sustain their staff, but there are some economic imperatives to this that the government appears not to be aware of. As I said, the Roy Morgan figures are based on face-to-face interviews, not phone interviews. They measure not only unemployment but also underemployment. As the ABS was claiming that the unemployment level was 5.2 per cent, the Roy Morgan survey was claiming that the unemployment rate was more like 8.6 per cent—which, I must admit, is what it feels like out there to me and to so many others. I am getting a lot of feedback at the moment from the LNP candidates in the Queensland election. These candidates include Jason Woodforth in Nudgee, who has canvassed all the small and large businesses and retailers in his area; Kerry Millard in Sandgate, a town which has not only a vibrant retail, hospitality and tourism sector but also a fishing industry, and they are all hurting; Darren Grimwade in Morayfield; and Lisa France in Pumicestone. In every one of those areas, there are businesses saying, 'We cannot employ the people we want to because we can't make the profits that we need to do so.' But this government will go on pretending that somehow, if they just use the mining figures, no-one else will notice what is happening in the rest of the economy. In anyone's language, 8.6 per cent unemployment sounds like a calamity—and it is. I would recommend to this government and to the Treasurer that they have a look at the Roy Morgan poll, because it appears to me to be reflecting reality somewhat more than the government's current figures do. In the past, I thought that the ABS figures at least compared apples with apples; even if they were doing phone interviews and talking about people who had worked for one hour in a fortnight, at least we were comparing apples with apples. But, when genuine Granny Smith or Red Delicious apples are being compared with shrivelled little pears, I think it is time to inspect the fruit to see what it is like. Underemployment is, of course, another major area and the ABS does not measure underemployment. Yet, according to the Roy Morgan statistics, as of December 2011 2.1 million Australians were unemployed or underemployed. That happens to be 16.8 per cent of our workforce. More than two million Australians are looking for more work or just a job of some sort. No wonder those opposite are on the nose with 70 per cent of the electorate when we have nearly 17 per cent of the electorate looking for work or for more work. To suggest that this is somehow the fault of employers is absolutely laughable. Are you genuinely trying to tell me that businesses forego business so that they can be mean to employees? Is that really how you think the system works? It is complete garbage. Despite the huge amount of money that the mining industry has put into it, Queensland, where the Treasurer hails from, has record debt. We have the second highest unemployment rate in Australia at 8.9 per cent on the Morgan figures and, remembering that they are comparing states, and an underemployment rate of 9.3 per cent. These are all those people that Senator Thistlethwaite says are working in retail. Of course, employers would give these people jobs if there were jobs to be given, if there was money to pay them. In Queensland, 18.2 per cent of the work-capable population is under-utilised. That helps to explain part of the productivity problem that we have in this country, but as long as the government insists on pretending that this does not exist, pretending that manufacturing, small business, tourism, retail are all okay we will continue to have this ridiculous calamity.