Queensland’s economic recovery plan is dressed in fluorescent orange.
Annastacia Palaszczuk and Deb Frecklington have spent the first 10 days of the state election campaign roaming regional electorates promising investment and jobs. At almost every whistle-stop, they front cameras wearing hi-vis vests and hard hats.
“I’ll be very clear here,” Palaszczuk, the state premier, said when asked about her campaign priorities last week. “Jobs, jobs and more jobs, that is absolutely our focus on getting Queenslanders back into work and making sure they have jobs.”
So far, the lion’s share of investment announced by the Labor and Liberal National parties has been geared to creating jobs. But plans have also been geared toward creating certain kinds of jobs – mainly in construction, manufacturing, mining and energy. The sort that lend themselves to hi-vis photo opportunities.
“But not everyone wants to swing a shovel,” Jan Perkins, a financial counsellor based in the central Queensland city of Mackay, says.
Across the world, women have been the hardest hit by lockdowns and economic slowdowns. September employment data in Queensland shows that among the state’s largest industries, job losses have been most significant in retail and hospitality.
The mining, agriculture, fisheries and energy sectors – industries that have each sought to run pre-election campaigns to promote their own contribution to the state – do not rank among Queensland’s 10 biggest job-creating sectors.
Perkins’s clients are mainly spread across the Isaac region; where six in 10 workers are employed in coalmining. She says local economies have been relatively resilient during the coronavirus pandemic, but those struggling were mostly not looking for manual work.
“The [local] economy is OK at the moment. But for people who are not employed, for people who are impacted by Covid-19 who have reduced hours or have lost their employment, or who haven’t met the eligibility for jobkeeper, things are really tough.
“Those luxuries such as entertainment, going out, they’re the things people can’t afford and so there’s a flow-on effect. Those people who really need support aren’t always the same cohort that are going to work on a construction site.”
An outdoorsy, blokey state
Dan Nahum, an economist for the Australia Institute’s Centre for Future Work, says blue-collar workers are “obviously very visible” but not an effective way for governments to generate economic activity.
“Queensland’s sense of itself is an outdoorsy, blokey sort of state where the resources industry is a large contributor to at least the economy, if not the labour force,” Nahum says.
“The very labour-intensive work that women have been doing before and right through the pandemic has been less visible, but it’s certainly socially vital.
“If you think that [the] nature of the crisis we’re dealing with right now is an employment crisis, then you can do a whole lot better than construction or civil engineering. Not that they’re not important, but if what you want [is] to address an employment crisis, then jobs in human and caring services deliver so much more bang for the buck.”
Analysis of employment data by the Australia Institute shows that for every $1m generated, the mining sector creates less than one job. For the same amount, 15 jobs are supported in education and training; 12 in healthcare and social services; 10 in hospitality.
“If you’re looking at the employment picture and thinking, ‘we need to find ways to employ the people who have been hardest hit by the pandemic,’ then directly employing women would be the way to do it.”
Nahum authored a report, released earlier this month, which warned of the economic impact of freezing or cutting public sector wages to offset spending on other stimulus measures.
Alex Scott, the secretary of Queensland’s largest government sector union, Together, said the analysis should prompt policymakers to tailor economic responses to those who have been most deeply affected by the pandemic, and “not those people who make good photo opportunities”.
“You end up with blokes in hi-vis suits as an economic strategy rather than looking at what is happening in the economy, and the people who are losing their job are women.”
John Quiggin, an economist at the University of Queensland, said Queensland had reverted from its “smart state” agenda under the former premier, Peter Beattie.
“Beattie was talking about the smart state and now we’re talking about how many cranes there are,” Quiggin said.
“Going on from that, there’s clearly a notion these [construction] jobs are real jobs and these are the kinds of jobs that ordinary people have. What we see is the sectors that employ the most people have are being ignored.
“It’s obvious the immediate impact [of the pandemic] has been very severe on the hospitality sector. The restrictions have largely eased but for people depending on overseas tourism it’s been bad.”
Both Labor and the LNP have each promised to employ additional health sector staff and police, though the vast majority of the parties’ spending promises are to build infrastructure projects or otherwise support jobs in blue-collar industries.
Labor has announced $1bn to build school halls and playgrounds, and another $1bn to manufacture trains in the marginal electorate of Maryborough. The LNP wants to build two big infrastructure projects – upgrading the Bruce Highway and building a network of irrigation projects and dams known as the Bradfield scheme.
Rising inequality
In tropical north Queensland, where the economy is built around tourism and largely reliant on international visitors, some of the more immediate measures to assist workers and businesses seem to have stalled the most dire unemployment predictions.
Visitor numbers dropped from 55,000 a day to 5,500; the tourism industry had warned about the loss of $2.5bn and 11,000 jobs. Cairns expected unemployment to rise to 12%, but the most recent figure is 6.1%.
These sorts of softer landings have provided state and federal governments an endorsement of their economic crisis management. Though there is still growing concern – especially among community support services – that while politicians promote a hi-vis recovery, measures to support vulnerable people are being wound back prematurely.
Last month Queensland ended its moratorium on rental evictions, claiming they were no longer needed and that the state had moved into a recovery phase.
On Wednesday, Aimee McVeigh, the chief executive officer of the Queensland Council of Social Services, met community sector groups in Toowoomba, where the unemployment rate, particularly among young people, has surged since the beginning of the pandemic.
She told Guardian Australia afterwards that election spending was not reaching the places it was needed.
“We’re in fairly extraordinary times, we’re not at all through an economic and health crisis. The crisis impacts disadvantaged and marginalised people more than anyone else.
“In Queensland, we have 25,600 families sitting on the social housing waiting list. Yet we’ve seen nothing for homelessness,” she said.
McVeigh said investing in the community services sector could help address inequality and directly help to address the employment imbalance created by the pandemic.
“We know we’ve got growing inequality, we’re going to have increased demand on community service organisations. Only one in 5 community organisations can currently meet the demand for services. We employ 80% women, and we’re 14% of Queensland’s workforce.
“If we’re going to have a hi-vis pantomime, at least we should have some support for people who are disadvantaged.”
