Page 2621 - Week 10 - Wednesday, 14 October 1992
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disposable income has changed by a meagre 0.1 per cent in the year ended June 1992. National average weekly earnings have increased by 2.9 per cent to June, although inflation has cancelled that out, meaning in fact no real wage growth. This is not an economic picture that should encourage anyone at the national level, certainly not Mr Keating.
In the ACT, average weekly earnings have increased by only 3.5 per cent since May 1991 - again, no real wage growth. In fact, we are probably going backwards. In the June quarter of 1992 private final consumption expenditure rose by only 0.3 per cent, against a national increase of only one per cent. Motor vehicle registrations remain at 1990 levels, and in the June quarter new registrations fell by 3.5 per cent. Activity in the construction industry here is a major economic indicator and a potential stimulus. It is volatile, with several encouraging quarters showing increases in financial commitments and in building approvals, but stagnant sales in many months. Commitments often reflect increased housing prices rather than numbers of houses that are being built, so I do not see any encouragement there. Mr De Domenico referred to the average retail trading figures in the ACT, and they do not sound too healthy either.
In all of this, Madam Speaker, I find no cause for optimism about our economy. I do not share Ms Follett's enthusiastic claims - perhaps they are just her expectations, real or unreal - for job growth in 1992-93. She seems to maintain these enthusiastic claims despite her own department's figures showing increasing unemployment into next year at least. Recent unemployment figures confirm the general trend shown in the quarterly report for June 1992. Unemployment was 17 per cent up as compared to June 1991. The job vacancy index trend is down, both in the ACT and nationally. The duration of unemployment is increasing, and participation rates for men, women and young people are all falling.
The unemployment rate rose in July by 1.1 per cent to 8.4 per cent generally, but youth unemployment rose from 11 per cent to 27 per cent. By September the unemployment rate had remained static at around 8.3 per cent. Comparison with the September quarter of 1991 shows that unemployment then was only 6.2 per cent. Even blind Freddy can see that there has been an increase of 2 per cent in the unemployment rate over the last year. For the Chief Minister to assert that the general unemployment rate is better than everywhere else, no matter how bad it is here, is simply unacceptable, and to use that as the basis for doing nothing is reprehensible.
The real scandal in the September figures is the increase in unemployment for 15- to 19-year-olds, referred to already by Mr De Domenico. It has risen to 56 per cent. I remind members that in June the rate was only 11 per cent. The Chief Minister has, of course, shrugged this off, saying that the statistics are quite imprecise; but this represents hundreds of unemployed youth. It is not just a statistic of 56 per cent or 11 per cent. No matter how imprecise the figures are, it ranges somewhere between 600 and 1,200 unemployed kids.
Mr Cornwell: She is not even here to listen to you.
MR KAINE: No, and she does not care about that. She just shrugs it off; the statistic is imprecise, so it does not matter. To the hundreds of young people that the statistic represents, these are cold hard facts. They are not just the rhetoric that the Chief Minister and Mr Lamont like to engage in.
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