Page 646 - Week 02 - Thursday, 21 February 1991
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excellent University of Canberra as another kind of educational institution, an excellent Catholic university and an excellent ADFA, all these tertiary institutions including TAFE will strengthen those kinds of things, so that we can begin to come up to the standards of a nation like Singapore. We are a long, long way from it.
I would like to reassert, in case anyone is in any doubt about it - and I can assure you that this has been a strong matter for me - that the Alliance Government refers to 10 people, not four. My colleagues know exactly how I feel about that.
I do recognise that, in some ways, the members of the ALP have been encouraging some forms of employment. I recognise that they took money from the pornography industry and have supported that industry. I hope that that will be an industry that will decline, not increase, in the ACT.
There is a constant charge that section 19 is something that we have dragged our heels on. I would remind members of the ALP that that was something that they put up; the initiative for a casino was something that the Federal Labor Government put up. The particular tendering process was something that came up from the Follett Government; we are only inheriting a system that it put forward. There is no procrastination, members of the ALP; there are no dragging feet. What we are doing is following through a process that you started. I can assure you that I wait every day for the conclusion of that tendering process which they created, and I hope that we will not then create employment for croupiers, for bar girls, for the kinds of employment that the Labor Government of Victoria, the Labor Government of Western Australia and so forth, get for their young people. We want better kinds of employment. We do not want that kind of employment. We want the kind of technical, high-tech, productive employment of the state of Singapore.
MR COLLAERY (Attorney-General) (5.11): Mr Speaker, my colleague the Chief Minister has indicated that the problems facing our young unemployed are national problems. The recent sharp rise in youth unemployment is not confined to the ACT, or to any one State. It is national in its scope and must be met by a concerted effort across the country.
Mr Speaker, youth labour market issues have remained high on the agenda of all Ministers responsible for youth affairs, be they Commonwealth or State colleagues. In meetings during 1990, it was decided that youth employment would be the major agenda item for the meeting of Youth Ministers scheduled for May 1991. It has never been questioned by me, my ministerial colleagues, or my Commonwealth and State counterparts that youth employment is a matter of national importance. None of us, irrespective of political orientation, has ever hesitated to do our utmost to meet the needs of the young unemployed.
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