Page 639 - Week 02 - Thursday, 6 March 2008
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that it was rushed into the mix by the Liberals in some haste after their leader’s failure to make a single mention of young families or inflation or interest rates in his motion yesterday.
Mr Seselja: We liked your own goal, Jon.
MR STANHOPE: Well, better late than never, I expect—better late than never. I am happy to have Labor’s record in this area stacked up against the Liberal Party’s any day of the week. You want to talk about the impact of government policy on young families. Let us talk about what the Vardon report uncovered about the state of child protection under the Liberals. Let us talk about the improvements that have been made in the literacy and numeracy levels of Indigenous children since the Labor Party took office.
ACT Labor have a cherished and very proud record of supporting Canberrans at every stage of their lives. Ours is a government that consciously responds to change in demographics and change in community needs. We know that a community is not a static thing; a suburb is not something that should be fixed in time. Facilities such as schools and health centres are not museums but places that serve the community and that adapt to the needs and demands of the community. Young families have always made up a solid proportion of our community, though with the ageing of our population they perhaps comprise a less overwhelming proportion than they did in the fifties, sixties and seventies.
Nevertheless, the family, in all its shapes and sizes and with all its varieties, is still the place where each of us gets our start in life, and Labor does everything in its power to see that that is a good start for every child. This means providing the mainstream services and infrastructure that support young families and improve the quality of their lives. It also means providing the services and infrastructure that support children and their parents when things go wrong, when for a multitude of reasons the journey gets a bit rough.
Supporting families also means putting in place the fundamental policy settings that enable Canberrans to simply get on with things: a strong economy and plentiful employment opportunities. And, of course, the same settings that deliver the security also deliver the prosperity that allows the government to implement policies to support those who need extra support. As I shared with this Assembly in my ministerial statement last year on the Canberra plan, on virtually all measures our standard of living has improved under Labor. We are earning more, we are learning more, and we are gaining in health and wellbeing. So let us look at some of the details.
Over the life of this government to date, 20,000 jobs have been created. The strength of the employment market is such that skills are now one of the major constraints on faster growth by our private sector. We must always look to the future and anticipate what is coming. We have to be proactive, not reactive. That is why just yesterday I announced that the government was working with the private sector and the commonwealth to respond to any employment implications contained in the forthcoming federal budget.
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