It is a year out from the State Election but many will be blissfully unaware, focused instead on getting home from work, picking up the kids from school or trying to work out excuses for Saturday's dinner with the in-laws. I should stress that my in-laws are exempt from that slight given their ongoing gold medal support in babysitting duties.

However in amongst many activities today the NSW Liberals/Nationals launched a 'Jobs Action Plan'. It is an important policy initiative that was many months in the making and followed our economic framework and consultation process that kicked off early 2009.

Through that process and in many Chambers of Commerce across the State, businesses told me that the cost of doing business was too high, indeed payroll tax was stopping them from hiring and stopping them from investing. With this sentiment it is no wonder NSW has trailed the nation in economic terms for so long.

The policy today is about drawing a line in the sand of NSW being last on every key economic indicator, particularly unemployment. (And that is a statement of fact, not spin.) It is about shedding NSW of the shame of being the only State in the country where unemployment has risen rather than fallen from a decade ago. Quite frankly enough is enough.

Our ‘Jobs Action Plan’ launched today has jobs at its heart. The objective is to reverse the decade-long trend of NSW suffering the lowest jobs growth in the country (at 15.1%). Contrast this to Queensland at 36%, Western Australia at 29.4% and Victoria at 25% and you’ll get a sense of why New South Welshman are fleeing our shores.

If NSW had just matched the growth of Victoria, there would be 282,000 more jobs in NSW today.

So, how does our plan start to turn NSW around?

If elected, we will support 100,000 new jobs by making them payroll tax free. This will send a strong signal to business to start hiring and will be a shot in the arm for our ailing State economy.

Our ‘Jobs Action Plan’ will work by:

• Providing a payroll tax rebate of $4000 per full-time employee for the first 100,000 new eligible jobs created in NSW;
• Paying the rebate in two equal parts, on the first and second anniversary of the hire of a new full-time employee to encourage long-term, sustainable jobs.

The plan is also available to part time employees helping new mums and dads coming off paternity leave, university students and school leavers. It unashamedly favours small and medium businesses as the rebate is based on the average wage making rebates more generous for lower wages.

To grow our economy and enable jobs growth, Government needs to remove obstacles to job creation. Our message to business is let's get this State moving again and very simply: go out and start hiring.

The Jobs Action Plan is based on independent economic modelling, which indicates that if implemented the unemployment rate would drop below the national average for only the second time in 54 months.

It is also independently costed and the net outlay is $87 million over four years, which will be included in our election costings. It should be noted that this excludes the broader economic benefit of the increased jobs which economists estimate would add $3.6 billion to the State economy.

The Jobs Action Plan is part of our vision to make NSW number one again – one that we will be working very hard on over the next 365 days.

Cheers

Mike

Read more about our Jobs Action Plan

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