Page 761 - Week 03 - Wednesday, 24 March 1993
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Madam Speaker, we heard from Ms Follett, before she was unfortunately snatched away from us, that this Government has a number of initiatives in place to provide jobs in the ACT. We heard that there were a great many areas in which job creation was going on in the ACT. Each one of those individual areas that were referred to by the Chief Minister deserves our unqualified support. We see those areas as being immensely important in building up individual areas of job growth in the ACT. But the question that we need to consider, the bottom line, has to be: What is the net effect of this so-called job growth going on in the ACT? The net effect, Madam Speaker, was revealed in the ABS figures for February that were released a few weeks ago, and they paint a very grim picture indeed. In January this year there were 157,100 jobs in the ACT. In February, one month later, there were only 156,700 - a loss of 400 jobs in the space of one month. That is the reality of what this Government has had to preside over, both federally and locally - a loss in the first part of this year at the rate of 100 jobs a week in the ACT.
I am very pleased to hear that we have job growth going on at the old opal and gemstone museum. I am very pleased to see that the casino is producing jobs in this community. I am very happy to hear about job growth programs and training programs going on around this Territory. But the bottom line does not show that it is having a net positive effect on our problem. If it were not for those areas of job growth, our figures would be even more startling, even more concerning, than the figures released by the ABS a couple of weeks ago. That is the reality, and the reality is that we need to be doing more than we presently are to be tackling this problem.
Ms Follett said in the course of her comments that we cannot fix the macro-economic factors affecting unemployment, and I would accept that to some extent. Those factors are, to a large extent, outside the control of the ACT. I might say that talking about the national and international trend with unemployment is not the way that the ALP tends to handle the debate when talking about the employment policies of conservative governments, as, for example, was the case when the New South Wales Government was blamed for a big contribution to rising unemployment in last month's unemployment figures. That to one side, there is a distinct impression underpinning the comments that the Chief Minister made that the ACT Government is a bit like a cork bobbing around in an ocean over which it has no control. That is true up to a point, but it dismisses the very real avenues available to the ACT to generate a very different environment in which jobs and employment can grow in this Territory. There are solutions available; there are things we can do.
Mr Berry: What are they? Come on, list them.
MR HUMPHRIES: I will come to that. The Government's approach has been to treat the private sector and employers in the Territory a bit like a horse. All we need to do, according to this ACT Labor Government theory, is to get this horse to the water and it will drink. This is the theory. The idea, therefore, is to create training incentive schemes and education programs for unemployed people, and business advice centres for the businessmen. You are actually not creating any employment; you are actually bringing together people who have skills and labour to offer and those who have a need for skills and labour, and helping them mesh and create jobs. That is the theory behind Labor's plan; that all you need to do is bring these members of the community who are looking for each other together and you will have jobs.
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