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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 07 Hansard (Wednesday, 30 June 2004) . . Page.. 3030 ..

about the need to improve the profile, the accessibility and the desire to get kids into vocational education.

Mr Hargreaves also spoke about support for Koomarri as a way of addressing the needs of those who are disabled in some way. That is true, but it is just one initiative that happened a couple of years ago. What have we done since then? What are we going to do into the future? Koomarri is not the only organisation and should not be the only organisation that looks after those with a disability. There are many other organisations and they need support as well. I suspect that there are many more people with a disability who are failing to access the employment market simply because the means for them to do so are not there. Of course, we can put those means there if we know how to address the problems, but to do that you have to have a comprehensive employment strategy.

We ran a very successful program which started as Youth 500. It was so successful that it became Youth 1000. I think it got to about Youth 1250 in the end. It was targeted quite specifically at youth unemployment—the 18.8 per cent of young Canberrans who currently do not have a job. We had a specific program. It had specific timeframes and it certainly had targets against it, which is exactly what Ms Tucker highlights in her amendment. She calls upon the government to do that, and she is right in doing so. It is the sort of activity that you need—targeted, focused and with a specific outcome that we can measure so that we know when we meet our target point. I think that that is the sort of thing we ought to be doing.

Why aren’t we talking about not having any student leave school and go on the dole? I am sure that many of you heard Bill Lawson speaking a couple of weeks ago about the no dole program that the Beacon Foundation started in Launceston in about 1994. For those that do not know of it, the Beacon Foundation went into what was considered to be the worst high school in Launceston, where 40 or 50 of the kids would leave school and go on the dole just to be like dad and like granddad, and attacked institutional second and third generation unemployment in a town that had not done particularly well in the last couple of decades.

The foundation was able to achieve a drop in the rate that kids went on to the dole from, I think, 34 per cent to 14 per cent in the first year. After that they had a year in which only 2 per cent of the students left school and went onto the dole. They then had four years in which none of the students left school and went on to the dole. Why aren’t we a no-dole jurisdiction? Why don’t we have a program like that? I understand that the Chief Minister is aware of this program and had briefings from the Beacon Foundation as well some time ago. Why aren’t we looking at that as a program?

I offer bipartisan support to the government: if the government wants to work with us, we will work with it to make the ACT a no dole jurisdiction for students leaving high school. The no dole project of the Beacon Foundation is aimed at students who are at risk of falling out at the high school level; it is not just about the students that make it to year 12. There is a handout to the government: if you want to work collectively on this, we will do so. I say that to the crossbenchers as well; the 17 of us should stand up in support of it.

Part of the project involves getting the community to commit to supporting these kids and everybody puts their signature on a big document. Perhaps the first 17 signatures on

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