Page 3728 - Week 12 - Thursday, 21 October 1993
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double the national average. I know that members opposite will never acknowledge that fact because they lie to themselves. They hear only what they wish to hear. But the fact is that our employment in this town has been growing at 4 per cent, and that far outstrips the rest of the country.
With particular regard to young people, I am sure that members are aware of the concern this Government has to assist young people. In our recent budget we provided $1.5m to continue with our initiatives aimed at assisting young people, particularly those who are suffering disadvantage, to get the appropriate training and workplace experience they need to be competitive in the job market. Those initiatives include, for instance, Joblink, where we are working in partnership with the Chamber of Commerce - another fact those opposite do not want to know about - in order to provide some hundreds of jobs for young people. We have continued with our efforts on Jobskills and with the Youth Conservation Corps and so on, but members opposite would never acknowledge that.
Over and above all that, I believe that the single most important thing any government can do to help generate employment is to provide a stable and sound economic environment for business to prosper, and that is exactly what we are doing in this Territory. The clowns opposite do not have to take my word for that. They have to look no further than, for instance, the work of Access Economics - hardly fans of Labor - to see the black-and-white facts of the Territory's economic performance. They can look at the Advance Bank's publications - not written by me - which also confirm the sound economic environment in this Territory.
I know that members opposite do not want to know any of those facts; but I will present them anyway, just on the off-chance that some of them might be listening, although I realise that that is remote. However, as I have said, I acknowledge that we have a particular problem with youth unemployment, teenage unemployment, 15- to 19-year-olds, in this Territory. We have taken a number of steps, including in the budget, to address that problem. We have also, in that $1m of work, supported a community initiative by FM104.7 in order to assist further. Why Mr De Domenico uses that fact to try to attack the Government just beats me. We are doing what a caring government ought to do to ease this situation. But I will not take the Liberal line - the $3 an hour youth wage line, the "screw the workers until they bleed" line - that we hear from members opposite. We will provide decent jobs, decent training, and treat all those workers with the respect they deserve.
Mental Health Services
MR MOORE: My question is directed to the Minister for Health. In the light of the Burdekin report on human rights and mental health, which you have now had 24 hours to read, what action do you propose to take in the ACT to ensure an improvement in the treatment of our mentally ill?
MR BERRY: One of the important features of the Burdekin report was the list on page 223 of all of the things that have been done in the ACT. We have certainly had a lot of achievements over the years since self-government. We were lumbered with legislation, which has been criticised by the Burdekin report, but in 1989 we started the process - I think I might have talked
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