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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 4 Hansard (7 May) . . Page.. 1057 ..

MRS CARNELL: Mr Speaker, I brought down an ACT budget yesterday. I can guarantee that we are spending more money on mental health in my budget. I simply cannot predict what the Federal Government will do next week in their budget; nor can I underwrite the Federal Government's budget to say that, if they cut funding in a particular area, somehow the ACT will pick it up.

MS REILLY: My question is to Mrs Carnell in her capacity as Chief Minister and Treasurer. Chief Minister, just two months ago you made a firm commitment at the youth unemployment symposium that you would commit $1m to youth job creation schemes generated by the symposium. Is it not true that the funding of your Creating Jobs for Canberra for such programs adds up to only $772,500, and that the announcements do not create any real jobs but offer only dubious training schemes?

MRS CARNELL: The answer is no, that is not the case. Also, I did not give a commitment to spend an extra $1m at the symposium. I do not think anyone here was present at that time; I think Mr Whitecross was, but he is not here now. Mr Whitecross would know that what I said to the symposium was that if we had $1m to spend on a jobs fund, which I knew we did at that stage, could the symposium please give me some feedback on how they would spend that, and they did. We managed to lead into our Jobs Now program, which is worth $2.255m, not $1m, which I think is a fairly impressive approach, plus our business incentive scheme, plus our marketing scheme, all of which will create jobs, to make $4.5m, not $1m. Of that $2.255m, as I said, $407,000 will be spent on 500 new traineeships, $60,000 extra for Youth Joblink, and $40,000 extra for the Youth Selfstart program. Those three were all recommended by the symposium, so the symposium recommended some $600,000 worth of funding that we actually made available in this budget. They also recommended that we go down the path of giving tender preference to people who had put on trainees or were employing young people from Canberra and the region - something we have also embraced.

On top of that, we are spending $625,000 on an accelerated data collection program. That is 25 real full-time jobs - in fact, they are all real jobs - in Urban Services. They are people we are going to employ. That $625,000 is on top of the $600,000 I have just set out. There is $31,000 extra for a new security training program, which was put forward by the indigenous community to create some real jobs in the security industry. There is $700,000 for the extension of the graffiti program, with 60 jobs.

There is $118,000 for some extra courses in the New Future in Small Business program; 96 people will go through that. The interesting thing about that course is that it is for older people, people who have taken redundancies, and it has been remarkably successful. Over 50 per cent of the people who went through that course last year set up their own small businesses, and another one-third got jobs in the private sector after doing the course. That is a tremendously successful program, and its success is the reason we are expanding it. There is $24,000 extra for Active Australia, and $250,000 for extra civilian members of the AFP. Again, they are real people; they are real jobs. All of these are real jobs, and real people will get jobs as a result of the $2.255m we have put in, not $1m.

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