Page 2442 - Week 09 - Thursday, 17 September 1992
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about, that we still have 11,559 people unemployed! What a fantastic effort by this Government! It cannot use the excuse that it has been around for only about a year. Its members have been around for a long time.
As Mr Moore and Ms Szuty said, it was a wonderful opportunity for this Government to display some sort of vision; but what did it do? It did nothing. They are not my words but the words of the Canberra Times, and, as Mr Kaine said, the Trades and Labour Council - not necessarily supporters of the people on this side of the house. They did not have any plaudits for this budget; nor did Dr Tomlinson, the poet laureate of Canberra. Nor did the Business Council, or anybody else. It seems to me that the only people who really believe what they are saying and what they are doing are the eight people on that side of the house, four of whom are not here. That is how important it is to you people.
Let us get onto the reality. The budget has approached job creation, Madam Speaker, by creating jobs that will last as long as the funding lasts. The budget could have created jobs by creating an economic environment which encouraged growth and therefore long-term employment opportunities, but it did not. Could not money for training schemes have been better spent, for example, to reduce the burdens on the private sector, sending out the message that this Government understands the economy and knows that only by encouraging growth can real long-term jobs be created? It did not do that.
Yesterday I suggested in the house that there were more training schemes than unemployed people. In today's Canberra Times - once again I do not need to go overseas to find out what is going on - there is a very interesting article on the value of training schemes. Really, the Chief Minister should take time to read it. She will find it to be most sobering reading. Let us have a look at it. It talks about the YES scheme, the NEAT scheme, the RED scheme, the WPP scheme and the CEP scheme. They have all been abandoned. It is no wonder that they have been abandoned.
Let us have a look at one scheme that was put in place by Mr Unsworth, the last Labor Premier of New South Wales, who from time to time was called all sorts of things. This program was in place in New South Wales. It cost the taxpayers a total of $92.5m and it was chucked out because it created hardly any jobs at all. They are the sorts of things that members of this Government stand up in this Assembly and boast about. They have all these marvellous schemes for people, but there is not one skerrick of evidence as to how many long-term jobs are going to be created. Yet this Government stands up and says, "Hey, we are fantastic; steady as she goes". Let us look once again at what the Canberra Times said. I will repeat it once again - "a government that is incompetent or paralysed - or both".
Turning again to employment, I mentioned the $92.5m that had been spent on a training program. A gentleman said in the Canberra Times, of these training programs:
They address the symptoms rather than the cause of labour market disadvantage.
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