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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 12 Hansard (21 November) . . Page.. 4084 ..

MR WHITECROSS (Leader of the Opposition) (12.16 am): Mr Speaker, I want to touch on a couple of further matters in relation to this item before I finish. Needless to say, the earlier remarks of Mrs Carnell and Mr Humphries were littered with misrepresentations of what I had said in my previous remarks too numerous for me to try to correct them all now. Mrs Carnell did say one thing which could be described variously as misleading and as deceptive and which I thought ought to be corrected. In her glowing report on the labour market Mrs Carnell suggested that unemployment had stabilised and that, in fact, employment had improved a little. Mr Speaker, the "Monthly Economic Monitor" reports that the October labour force statistics - and, of course, they are the most recent ones - point to the - - -

Mrs Carnell: And job figures have gone up. Advertisements have gone up.

MR WHITECROSS: Mrs Carnell wants to talk over me, Mr Speaker, because she does not want to hear this; but it states:

The October Labour Force statistics point to the continuation of a slowing in the ACT labour market. Unemployment stabilised, but the participation rate has decreased since September.

The unemployment rate has stabilised because the participation rate has decreased. The document continues:

The unemployment rate of 8.5% is slightly below the national average of 8.7%.

I am sure we all remember that Mrs Carnell said "rose", but what it says here is:

Employment fell in October, the twelfth successive month of decreasing employment.

It goes on to say that the unemployment rate for teenagers seeking full-time work decreased slightly to 53.5 per cent from 54.2 per cent but was still much greater than the national figure of 26.5 per cent. No-one would say those were good figures; but they hardly fit Mrs Carnell's description of an economy on the bounce, responding to the stimulation of her jobs budget, which is the impression she tried to create. Mr Speaker, there is not much good news there. Mrs Carnell ought not to be creating the impression that just because people have given up and left the labour force, causing the participation rate to fall, somehow or other the economy is responding to her non-existent stimulation of the ACT economy.

Mr Speaker, the reality is that Mrs Carnell's main strategy for producing economic growth in the ACT community is trying to talk the economy up. Six months ago she was telling us all that there were no problems with John Howard sacking public servants; that it was a piece of malicious Labor Party propaganda that the Federal Liberal Party were going to sack some people in Canberra. We all know how true that was. Mrs Carnell and her deputy, Mr De Domenico, then spent the next few months telling us that they were all going to get jobs in the private sector, so we did not need to worry.

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