Grievance Debate

Unemployment Figures

Mr PISONI (Unley) (15:17): For 14 years, Labor has been running the South Australian economy, and for at least half that time Labor was relying on all of its eggs in one basket: the 23,000 jobs promised for Olympic Dam that never happened. We heard the member for Playford, in his first and only budget in this place, tell us that next year and the year after would be very different in South Australia because the Olympic Dam would be operating. That never happened at all.

We heard that 6,000 jobs would be created at Gillman—there is no confirmation of that happening. Five thousand new jobs in the mining industry were announced this time last year, and there are actually fewer people now working in mining than when that announcement was made.

I remember there was a promise of hundreds of jobs at McLaren Vale for the Marcos sports car company that was moving to Adelaide. We all remember the photographs of the Premier down at the race track, telling us about the Markos car factory moving to McLaren Vale. McLaren Vale was important because it was a marginal seat that Labor needed to win at the 2006 election in order to be in government in their own right, which of course they did, without being part of the promise.

The government told South Australians that this year's budget was a jobs budget. Since then, 3,400 South Australians have joined the job queues and 1,800 full-time jobs have disappeared. South Australia's unemployment rate has trended up every month for the past 12 months. The Premier and his government have been telling South Australians that our economy is going through a transforming phase for at least the last decade. It was the reason why Skills for All was announced as an election policy in 2010, and at the same time they announced that there would be 100,000 new jobs in South Australia by 2016. That is only a few months away, and guess what: they are more than 90,000 jobs short of that target.

We saw, with the news yesterday of another 200 jobs gone from Santos, that the government felt that it needed to at least pretend it was doing something, that it was interested in the job losses that are happening in South Australia, and so we saw the government start ringing South Australians, asking them to participate to find solutions for jobs in South Australia. This is code for, 'We don't know what to do. We've run out of ideas. We have no idea. For 14 years we have let this situation deteriorate.' Up to 115,000 people will be cold-called over the next couple of days, with 48,000 last night.

My mother was one of them being called by the Premier last night with a recorded message. From that message, she actually expected a personal call from the Premier tonight, because that is what the message said, that he would call her tonight at 6.30. But, of course, what is happening is there will be another 100,000 people on hold while the Premier is making this town hall call in the northern and western suburbs. What is he going to tell them? Is he going to be spinning more nonsense about Labor's plans to blame others for the situation that South Australia is in?

My mother understands what is going on. Living in the seat of Lee in Semaphore, she sees the unemployment issues and the poverty. She is very concerned about it, and she believes it is the government's role to fix it. She will not be answering her phone today because she does not want to be part of a government stunt by Premier Weatherill and the Labor Party. She wants to see results. As a matter of fact, she was quite offended by the fact that there was no genuine interest in what she had to say from the Premier when he called.

After 14 years in South Australia of Labor government, we have the highest unemployment in the nation. It is 8.1 per cent in South Australia; the next highest is Tasmania at 6.5 per cent. The problem with this government is that it has given up and it has no idea of how to generate jobs in South Australia, but it can generate stunts and it is happy to use taxpayers' money to do it.