Page 2430 - Week 09 - Thursday, 17 September 1992
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In the Chief Minister's speech and in her answer yesterday to a dorothy dix question from either Mr Lamont or Ms Ellis, there were a number of comments about the 220 new places this year in government employment and training schemes. Let us make it quite clear, when we talk about employment and training schemes, that what we really mean has nothing to do with employment schemes. These are training schemes for employment, and that is where there is a lack of clarity. The average expenditure on these - this follows the interjection I made yesterday - is of the order of $11,000 per person. I wonder how many unionists - and a number of the Labor members here have come out of the unions - would support anybody earning $11,000 a year? Should that be considered to be a reasonable aspect of some employment scheme? They are not employment schemes, of course; they are training schemes.
The ACT youth conservation corps gets $2m in 1992-93, which will provide 40 places this year and 80 places in a full year. So we are talking about an investment of some $2,500 each. If you work the figures the other way round, you could argue that it is $5,000 each. Either way, it is hardly the sort of money that is providing jobs. It is providing training. But what is the point of training when there are no jobs to be trained for? What was most important - and it could have happened, but the opportunity was lost - was to provide real jobs in a long-term sense. Real jobs were provided by the increase in capital expenditure in the area of housing construction. There is no question about that, and the Government deserves congratulations on that. But those jobs are by their nature short term. They last as long as the particular construction lasts.
What we need in the ACT is a strategy that provides for long-term jobs in the manufacturing industry, and increased jobs in service to government, particularly in providing excellence in technology. There is no question about the amount of money the Commonwealth Government, and the ACT Government to a very minor degree, expends in terms of high technology. It is an area where the ACT is positioned particularly well because of the universities. We already have people with the understanding of high technology and we have the ability to bring manufacturing industry into the ACT. Here was another opportunity lost.
Turning to education, it seemed to me that comments in this morning's newspaper also referred to opportunities lost. While under Trevor Kaine and the conservative Liberals we would no doubt see cuts to education, and we heard the business sector talk about cuts to education, it surprises me that we should also see cuts to education from this Labor Government. According to this morning's Canberra Times:
The President of the council, Pam Cahir, says cuts to expenditure on the schools' budget would amount to 2.5 per cent, not 1.8 per cent as projected by the Government, over the next year and in real terms was more likely to be something in the order of 4 per cent ... taking into account higher enrolments against a background of an unchanged level of resources.
Mr De Domenico: Who said that?
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