Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . .

Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 4 Hansard (16 April) . . Page.. 939 ..

MR WHITECROSS (continuing):

The Liberal Government just says, "So what? Let us not worry too much about it. Hopefully, it will all turn out". But unemployment is not a joking matter; it is something that seriously affects people's lives. Public servants who lose their jobs and young people who cannot get jobs because of staff recruitment freezes like Mrs Carnell's suffer loss of self-esteem; they suffer hardship for their families; they suffer the social dislocation of having to abandon houses, to sell houses; they impose burdens on social security. It is a very serious problem for the people who are affected. It is not a joking matter, and there is no way out being offered by Mrs Carnell, who sits by and watches her Federal colleagues reducing the size of employment.

At the same time as this is going on, we have a situation where the private sector is already in a poor state. We have a situation, as I indicated earlier, where the retail sector is reporting increases in retail sales at half the national figure and less than the rate of inflation. The tourism industry is reporting a massive underperformance compared to the national average. Once again, the increase in business being taken by the tourism industry is less than the rate of inflation. At the same time, we have the housing industry in the doldrums. The housing industry, a major employer of people in the ACT, with significant multipliers for the general community, is going nowhere, and it is going nowhere because of the crisis of confidence in the business community, the crisis of confidence in the ACT community. The economy is in a desperate state and it is about to get worse, as Mr Kaine has rightly said.

People who lose their jobs face two choices: A life of unemployment in the ACT or packing up their bags, upping stumps, and moving to somewhere where the jobs are. Whichever option they take, the result will be the same: Less revenue for the ACT Government, less business for the private sector, and a disastrous situation for the Canberra community as a whole. Yet this Government and this Chief Minister are doing nothing about it. Mrs Carnell says, "It is all too hard to think about because we do not know which number to pick. We do not know how to do this, so we are just going to bury our heads in the sand. We are just going to hope that the private sector will pick it up". A more unrealistic, more naive approach than the approach being taken by the Chief Minister and the Deputy Chief Minister would be hard to imagine. They have a fatalistic belief that somehow or other you can contract the size of the public sector, you can contract the size of the ACT economy, and at the same time create more jobs in the private sector. It is just naive, stupid and absurd.

In Mrs Carnell's answers earlier today she made some false claims about the performance of the former Government. The reality is that, between March 1983 and March 1995, 15,600 extra people worked in the Commonwealth public sector. That is the record of the Federal Labor Government - an increase in employment over that period. They are ABS statistics.

Mr De Domenico: You cannot say that. That is bunkum. They are CFMEU statistics, I think.

MR WHITECROSS: The bunkum is the rubbish being talked by the Government. The record of the Labor Government was that more people worked there at the end of the Labor Government than worked there at the beginning. Those are ABS statistics.

Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . .