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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 12 Hansard (7 December) . . Page.. 3928 ..

MS CARNELL (continuing):

three quarters, but it was close. Our unemployment rate went up significantly to over 8 per cent and things did not look all that great for Canberra and for Australia's national capital.

I would ask all members to remember what the ACT's budget looked like at that stage. When we came to government in 1995 we had an operating loss of some $344 million. We had a budget situation where we did not know what anything cost. Yes, there had been some improvements in the way the budget was put together during the Labor years. We had got to a stage where I think we knew how many cars we had. I think Mr Kaine will remember the real difficulty in those years of getting figures on paper of what the ACT budget situation actually looked like.

We had a situation where the federal government was reducing funding to the ACT. In fact, our funding was almost cut in half over those initial years. So we had a budget that had a significant operating loss. We had the federal government significantly reducing employment. As I said, our major employer had cut staff by some 7,000. The ACT was in a position where it had to cut staff as well to address our budget situation and the federal government was cutting funds. It is easy to forget just how tough things were those few years ago.

Well, we took a positive approach. There were two ways you could go. You could sit on your hands and whinge and complain and blame the federal government or you could say, as we did, "Let's make a difference; let's change the ACT; let's ensure that our kids can get jobs in this city even though they most likely will not be in the public service; let's make sure that this city does have a diversified business base and a very real future that is not totally reliant on the federal government."

We put in place a whole range of policies. We started, of course, with a set of policies to encourage business and to create jobs. I think members will remember Youth 500, a program that we put together to encourage ACT businesses to put on 500 young people. At the time that seemed like a huge number but in partnership with the private sector Youth 500 became Youth 1,000. It was one of the most successful job - creation schemes that have ever been run, not just in the ACT but Australia - wide, because when we did a 12 - month assessment of that program we found that over 75 per cent of those jobs were still there. And, of course, that is a very unusual scenario in those sorts of job programs.

I think everybody on this side of the house - and I hope everyone in the Assembly - was really proud of the way Canberra was rallying. Canberra business people and Canberrans were saying, "No, we are not going to let this get to us, we are going to make our economy work. We are not going to allow federal government cuts to undermine the future of our city." And they did not.

ACTBIS, a program to encourage businesses to grow and to set up in the ACT, has created something like 2,000 jobs since we first set it up back in 1996 - 97. The problem, Mr Speaker - and I do not plan to be terribly negative at all in this speech; I want to talk about the good things that have happened - is that when you look back, a whole range of those programs were opposed. Programs such as ACTBIS, our program to encourage businesses, have been constantly opposed in this place. And yet they have worked. They have worked because we have had the guts to take the calculated risks that go with really

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