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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 4 Hansard (7 May) . . Page.. 1042 ..

QUESTIONS WITHOUT NOTICE

Public Service - Youth Employment

MR WHITECROSS: My question without notice is to the Chief Minister. Chief Minister, in your Jobs for Canberra fantasy in last year's budget you boasted that you were spending $450,000 on permanent trainee positions, plus $130,000 on apprentices in the ACT Public Service and ACTEW, in addition to subsidising 50 temporary trainees to the tune of $5,000 each. In addition, you indicated that the cost of these trainees would be met by the individual ACT Public Service agencies to the tune of $4,000. The total of all these measures, by my estimate, is more than $1m.

Mr Humphries: That is a big qualification.

MR WHITECROSS: You can add it up yourself, Mr Humphries. In this year's jobs document, Creating Jobs for Canberra, you list all the existing job schemes that you are continuing. None of these programs is mentioned. However, you do say that you have transferred $100,000 from the youth traineeship scheme to the new Youth500 scheme. Chief Minister, what happened to the rest of the $1m you previously committed to employment of young people in the ACT Public Service?

MRS CARNELL: I can understand why Mr Whitecross is feeling somewhat embarrassed by the budget I brought down yesterday and why he is having extreme trouble accepting a $4.5m package for jobs and business creation, the single largest infusion into the jobs market and one that has been supported by the community sector. I can understand why he is a bit embarrassed about all of that. The reality is that we are not spending just $4.5m, by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, the amount of money we are spending on business and employment initiatives in this city is closer to $8m. Of that nearly $8m, $3m is for youth unemployment, new youth jobs.

The $2.255m I announced yesterday in Jobs Now are new dollars. They do not include the dollars from last year. What they include, though, is such things as the Youth500 scheme; as Mr Whitecross rightly said, there is $100,000 from last year transferred to this year, but we made $407,500 available in this budget. Add on the $100,000 from last year, and you get the $500,000 - in fact, $507,000, probably.

Mr Whitecross: So it is not new money?

MRS CARNELL: The $2.255m includes $407,000, Mr Whitecross, not the $500,000. The fact is that we are spending $500,000 on 500 new trainee jobs. Mr Whitecross might be asking how we are tracking against last year's jobs budget.

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