Page 1305 - Week 05 - Thursday, 25 June 1992
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The budget strategy contained a lot of motherhood statements, but its substance was very little. We do know, though, what the real budget strategy is. We have seen taxation by stealth. We have seen charges and rates go up. We have seen taxation by press release. We have seen situations where rates and charges have gone up by more than the inflation rate. We have seen TAFE charges go up by 20 per cent, buses by 4 per cent, tobacco by 25 per cent and parking by 8 per cent. The CPI increase, we are told, is presently 3 per cent, although others tell us that it is 1.7 per cent and others still tell us that it is 0 per cent. We have not seen the other side of the ledger. What about the 250 redundancy packages in the Public Service that Ms Follett talked about, and she mentioned it again the other day? What about modifying our industrial relations system? What about savings in ACTION? What about corporatising ACTEW? Where is the micro-economic reform? What about sound economic management? And the budget is yet to come! I and the Liberal Party are very disappointed with that strategy.
Question resolved in the affirmative.
YOUTH EMPLOYMENT
Ministerial Statement and Paper
Debate resumed from 18 June 1992, on motion by Mr Berry:
That the Assembly takes note of the papers.
MR DE DOMENICO (3.36): Madam Speaker, I rise very briefly to talk on this report and paper. I believe that in the main the paper is very good. Once again, it talks about the most important thing we need to discuss in this Assembly - the rate of youth unemployment in Canberra. One point I should like to make is that Dr Colin Adrian, the secretary of the committee that looked into this issue, said on a radio program that in his opinion the youth unemployment figure for the ACT was 3,000. That flies in the face of the ABS figures, which attempted to tell us last time that it was something like 11.7 per cent. What I am saying is that perhaps 11.7 per cent is an unrealistic guess at the rate of youth unemployment. There is no reinvention of the wheel approach to achieving a better rate of employment, whether youth or adult. We have to make sure that the cost of labour is less than it is now. We also have to make sure that the private sector is given the incentive to employ labour.
The report made some very interesting recommendations. It referred, for instance, to the deregulation of the labour market as far as youth wages are concerned. It is not alone in recommending that. Such a luminary as Mr Carmichael from time to time tends to speak the truth, and he speaks very well. He agrees that we ought to be looking at youth wages; that we ought to be looking at deregulating trading hours. We should deregulate trading hours at the same time as we deregulate the labour market, because things like that are very important. The report says a lot of the things that the Liberal Party has been saying for a long time. Recommendation 14 states:
The ACT Government investigate the deregulation of trading hours, to bring them at least into line with those in NSW (and Queanbeyan in particular).
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