'Only tiny' carbon tax effect on mining jobs

In a report released this morning entitled How Many Jobs is 23,510 Really? he attempts to put into perspective a claim by the Minerals Council that a carbon trading system would cut by about 24,000 people the number who would be employed in the mining industry.

"Something like 370,000 people every month go from not having a job to having a job, and something like 365,000 people every month do the opposite," he said. "That's the change every month. The Minerals Council has projected its change over a period of 10 years.

"The additional outflow would be five people for every 10,000 who would have left in the month anyway. I am happy to call that invisible. I was going to draw it for the report but I couldn't - you can't draw a graph because the effect is too tiny.

"What it says is the carbon price debate should have nothing to do with job-loss figures. The labour market issue should be seen to be irrelevant. It is not interesting, it is not something we should spend any further effort analysing."

The report prepared for the Australia Institute also challenges the assumption that any mining workers who did lose their jobs would fall into unemployment.

Using data from the household income and labour dynamics survey, Professor Chapman finds that in the previous mining boom 26 per cent of mining industry employees left the industry each year.

"On average [about] 36 per cent of people employed in mining are inflows, having arrived that year. [About] 26 per cent are outflows - they won't be there the next year," he said.

"This extraordinary mobility suggests strongly that any supposed job losses would be dwarfed by natural attrition."

The seven-year study finds that workers leaving mining almost always go to other jobs.

"Nobody who left mining after 2001 was unemployed when observed a year later," the report says. "The vast majority of those leaving mining sector employment were employed in other jobs in all the years following.

"When you talk about job losses people think about jobs actually being cut whereas the industry is talking about jobs that would not be created. You also think about people being sacked and going into long-term unemployment and becoming destitute. In the mining industry that is not correct," Professor Chapman said.

The report says the misuse of big-sounding jobs claims to describe very small effects is widespread.

"As an example the release of the Murray-Darling Basin Plan encouraged assessments of direct jobs in the range of [about] 3500 to 12,000. The Climate Institute has claimed that a shift in production towards cleaner energy will result in [about] 34,000 net new jobs in the Australian power sector by 2030," the report says. "Obviously the issue relates to both sides of the carbon price debate."

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