No massage of jobs data, says minister

Employment Minister Eric Abetz has rejected reports his staff told officials to "massage" jobs figures.

News Corp Australia on Monday reported advisers to Senator Abetz wanted 160,000 jobs added to forecasts due this week as the government strives to meet a pledge to create one million jobs over five years.

Labour market analysts within the Department of Employment had originally projected the addition of 838,100 new jobs over five years, a figure the minister's office wanted "scaled up", the report said.

But in a strongly worded statement Senator Abetz denied the claims.

"At no stage did staff in my office request that figures be 'scaled up'," he said.

"At no stage did staff in my office suggest that the department's figures be 'dumped' and replaced with alternative figures.

"At no stage did any staff in my office suggest that figures be 'massaged'."

He says the report was based on "selectively leaked" information and the newspaper did not seek to verify it.

Senator Abetz says the department will publish its annual employment projection figures this week, as intended.

But he stressed the figures would be based on November 2013 data and would not take account of the government's policy initiatives to increase employment.

After Senator Abetz rejected the claims, opposition employment and workplace relations spokesman Brendan O'Connor said the minister had been "found out" and still had serious questions to answer.

"This is definitely a real concern, that you have a government running interference with the independence of the public service," Mr O'Connor told reporters in Perth.

"There's more fiddles here than at the Tamworth Country Music Festival."

He said the government's claim that its job creation plan was on track was "not the case" and was 65,000 jobs fewer than promised already.

Mr O'Connor pounced on a call by Woodside and National Australia Bank chairman Michael Chaney - a member of the government's new Business Advisory Council - to reintroduce individual agreements and cut penalty rates.

"If it were to take effect, (it) would diminish and reduce the take-home pay of thousands and thousands of Australians, and for that reason, we want the government to repudiate the comments by Mr Chaney and indeed indicate where the government sits," Mr O'Connor said.

Labor's lead candidate for the re-run West Australian Senate election, Joe Bullock, said Mr Chaney's comments showed that restoring the most unfair aspects of WorkChoices was the government's real agenda.

Mr O'Connor said that was revealed in a leaked draft of the terms of reference of a planned review of the Fair Work Act earlier this month.