Page 4530 - Week 14 - Wednesday, 23 November 2005
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
government over the head. Let us not look at any of the things being proposed, we will oppose them because they are being suggested by the Howard Liberal government.
I think it is time we had a little history lesson in this place. We had a little look at the welfare reforms we have seen in the past 20-odd years. For my sins, or for whatever reason, I spent a considerable amount of time in the mid-1990s working in the commonwealth Department of Employment, Education and Training and, in the mid-1990s in particular, working in the area of the federal office that oversaw labour force programs and the application of programs through the Commonwealth Employment Service. For a particularly long period of time I was involved in that wonderful testament to Labor policy—the labour market program’s white paper called “working nation”. If ever there was a misnomer, that was it. Paul Keating and his “working nation” were ably supported by bomber Beazley, who is now the Leader of the Opposition. We had a little look at the history of “working nation” and some of the Labor Party programs.
Mr Stefaniak: Noodle nation!
MRS DUNNE: No. It was worse than noodle nation. It put a whole lot of people on the scrap heap. It saw the light of day; it saw people implementing it; and we saw lives ruined because of it. “Noodle nation” is just an object of derision; “working nation” is a national tragedy. To put a little context about where the Labor Party was going in the mid-1990s, I remember that one of my jobs was to write drafts of speeches for departmental officials and ministers to present on a variety of occasions. I remember being called upon on one occasion to write the first draft of a speech for Mr Beazley to present at a book launch at the national press club. When the speech as presented came back to the department, it was no surprise to me that none of the words I had prepared seemed to have appeared in Mr Beazley’s speech.
Mr Beazley’s speech on that occasion—back in 1993—sits strongly in my mind, because it was the day I realised there was no hope for unemployed people while ever he was the minister for employment. He said then that we would never achieve five per cent unemployment again and that, if we ever got to five per cent unemployment, that was as low as we could go. We need to remember that, at that time, we were looking at a million people out of work, with a huge proportion of those having been out of work for more than 12 months. They were the long-term unemployed. Bomber Beazley said, “Like the poor, they will always be with us. We can’t do anything about it.” They proved it with “working nation”.
In “working nation” they came up with a whole lot of programs and a whole lot of variations to programs to address, with a supply side solution, a demand side problem. The problem was that there were a whole lot of people—at one point one million Australians—out of work, looking for employment. The Labor Party came up with reforms to the labour force programs to somehow better educate people for non-existent jobs.
One of the especially exquisite elements of “working nation” was the capacity they used to move long-term unemployed people off the long-term unemployed list. They did that by two means: one was to put people into short-term fake jobs; then, when they came out of those fake jobs and had no jobs to go to, they were no longer long-term unemployed
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .