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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2002 Week 4 Hansard (9 April) . . Page.. 853 ..

MS GALLAGHER (continuing):

While those who are unemployed have their status recognised in the labour force survey, and have the attention of policy makers and economists, those who suffer underemployment can exist in statistical shadows. Underemployment can be just as devastating for the people who experience it as unemployment is and it can have the same impact on their families.

Those who are underemployed are genuinely less likely to have access to benefits such as sick leave and maternity leave, they tend to be less likely to receive employer contributions to their superannuation, and they are less likely to be able to contribute themselves. Those who are underemployed tend to have less job security than those employed on a full-time permanent basis. While these people exist in any significant number, hidden by their "employed" status, we cannot rely on the labour force statistics as they are currently collected to realistically measure our economy or the needs of our society.

Another shortfall of the labour force survey is the category of "not in the labour force". This category excludes long-term unemployed who no longer actively seek work. Equating the desire to work with searching for work is to ignore "discouraged workers" who feel the probability of success does not justify expending time or money on searching for a job. Discouraged workers, who are more likely to be the long-term unemployed, do not show up as such. These are the people that the system has failed the most-people who are so unhopeful of finding work that they feel it would be a waste of time to look. Yet, these are the people that the system and the survey can make invisible. If we could acknowledge these people as being unemployed, as well as recognising the underemployed, we could have a true picture of the labour market and would be able to direct policy accordingly.

There can be no doubt that unemployment as a social issue has impacts into the future, and that higher unemployment today will lead to other social and economic problems related to a reduced tax base, increased reliance on age pensions and a greater strain on the public health system. A broader view of current employment rates, one that analyses underemployment as well as unemployment, can only assist in addressing these issues, planning for the future and hopefully reducing their negative effects.

While the labour force survey used by the Australian Bureau of Statistics to gather employment data has been accurate and useful in the past, we have now reached a point where the survey and its categories cannot provide the best measure of the current and future needs of our labour force.

The ABS has to be commended for maintaining pace with developments in international standards for measuring labour force participation, and it must also be noted that the labour force survey and some of the category definitions were changed in April 2001 in order to keep up with international standards. There are also international standards for defining underemployment and, using those standards, the ABS collects data in the underemployed workers survey as a supplement to the labour force survey each September.

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