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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 10 Hansard (Wednesday, 25 August 2004) . . Page.. 4202 ..

programs, the SPICE program and industry programs, which have been very successful in this town, in collaboration with the unions, the government, the students and the employers. I think that is an excellent program in the building and construction industry, for a start.

We must also look at the effects of part-time work on students because it is an issue with regard to the study load. That is a bit of a difficult one. In this option we are getting students to stay after school to learn, yet we are trying to get them into part-time work, in particular. I know that Ms Dundas bases a lot of her thoughts on the document out of the UK entitled Listening to children. I was very interested to read that and thank her very much for that piece of information. Other than that, the Liberal opposition will be happy to support Ms Dundas’s motion, except for item (2), on which we will accept the government’s amendment.

MRS CROSS (8.10): I rise to commend Ms Dundas on her motion, which I will be supporting; and I support Ms Gallagher’s amendment.

MS DUNDAS (8.10), in reply: I will speak to the amendment and will also be closing the debate. I thank members for their participation in this debate. There have been some very important additions added to the whole context of what I am trying to achieve here and, more broadly, what we as a community are trying to achieve in relation to supporting our young people. So I thank members for their input. I think we have done a lot this evening in broadening the debate a little, recognising some of the problems we have and some of the many different innovative ways that are being thought through as to how we can support young people in need and young people at risk in our community.

I support the government’s amendment. I can see the need for that. They want to take time to investigate how this can work and look at it as part of the next budget considerations. I would note that it is one of those constraining things as a member of the crossbench that you put down an open-ended proposal and then you get lambasted for not having any concrete ideas; and, if you put down a concrete idea, then you get lambasted for not being flexible enough. I wear that as it is and I see where the government is trying to get with this amendment, which I think is commendable.

It is important to recognise that there are many in our community for whom long-term unemployment is a reality. Even though we have a very low unemployment rate across the territory, we need to recognise that unemployed people in the community are most likely long-term unemployed and that they face the prospect of never having a job. That puts great pressure on their children. As I have stated before, the reports and statistics show that these are often the children of those families who themselves never have a job, and we have generational unemployment happening in our community.

This motion and the debate today have moved us one step closer to discussing how we can address those issues. I again thank members for the different areas of debate they raised. I thank the minister for bringing in the idea that we need to find the right balance between after-school jobs and the work students are doing in school so that their schoolwork does not suffer. I always recognised that that was important. That is why I was trying to see these programs working after school, but there might be better ways of doing that.

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