Page 927 - Week 03 - Thursday, 14 March 1991
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Unemployment Statistics
MRS NOLAN: My question is to the Chief Minister. Will the Chief Minister comment on the latest unemployment statistics for the ACT, released today by the Australian Bureau of Statistics?
MR KAINE: I am delighted to have the opportunity to do so. It is only a short time ago that the Leader of the Opposition tried to win a cheap point or two by referring to the latest statistics, which showed a fairly high rate of youth unemployment in the ACT. The Leader of the Opposition may be interested to know that youth unemployment in particular in the ACT dropped from one month to the next - from 35.7 per cent, which applied the last time the statistics came out, to 23.5 per cent this month.
That demonstrates that there has been a major reduction in youth unemployment. It also demonstrates what the Leader of the Opposition will never understand in a million years, no matter how many times I explain it to her: There is a seasonality about youth unemployment in the ACT. To take a figure when it is at its annual high, which always occurs over the period of December-January, and to quote that as though somehow it is a standard youth unemployment rate in the ACT is a gross abuse of the statistics.
However, it is not only youth unemployment that has dropped considerably in the ACT. The unemployment rate as a whole for the ACT fell to 7.7 per cent from the 8.1 per cent that applied in January. So, there has been a significant reduction in unemployment generally in the ACT and a very significant reduction in youth unemployment. Our youth unemployment figure, incidentally, is now much lower than the national figure, which stands at 25 per cent, whereas ours is at 23 per cent. So, in terms of both youth unemployment and general unemployment we are doing pretty well.
On the question of statistics, when the Opposition was trying to prove something about the ACT unemployment figures last month it might have been interesting to have looked at figures elsewhere. During the period from January last year to January this year the unemployment rate for Victoria rose from 12 per cent to 25 per cent - a 100 per cent increase in unemployment. In South Australia it rose from 7 per cent to about 12 per cent, which was a 50 per cent increase. In the same period in the ACT the unemployment rate rose by only 33 per cent. So, by any standard of comparison the unemployment rate and the rate of change in the ACT are better than in any of the States, and the figures are, in my view, sustainable.
I reiterate the point that those figures throughout Australia clearly demonstrate that the unemployment rate here and elsewhere stems from the same cause, that is, economic policy at the Federal level. It has nothing to do with what we at this level do; it is endemic.
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