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House of Assembly - Fifty-Second Parliament, Second Session (52-2)
2013-02-06 Daily Xml
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Question Time

EMPLOYMENT FIGURES

Mr MARSHALL (Norwood—Leader of the Opposition) (14:05): My question is to the Premier. Which jobs creation forecast is correct? Is it the Premier's promise yesterday to create 100,000 new jobs by 2016, or is it the jobs growth forecast in the Mid-Year Budget Review, which only predicts the creation of 35,000 new jobs by 2016?

The Hon. J.W. WEATHERILL (Cheltenham—Premier, Treasurer, Minister for State Development, Minister for the Public Sector, Minister for the Arts) (14:05): Both are accurate. They do different things. One is a—

Members interjecting:

The Hon. J.W. WEATHERILL: Feigned laughter.

Mr Marshall interjecting:

The Hon. J.W. WEATHERILL: Don't slip back into the old ways. You were doing so well yesterday. The way in which both of those forecasts sit together is that one is a conservative estimate for the purposes of our budget forecast, the other is an aspirational—

Mr Marshall interjecting:

The SPEAKER: I call the leader to order.

The Hon. J.W. WEATHERILL: —goal for our party, which we set out in the last election and we continue to pursue.

Ms Chapman interjecting:

The SPEAKER: I call the deputy leader to order.

The Hon. J.W. WEATHERILL: We are proud of the fact that we are pursuing an ambitious growth target for South Australia for jobs. That is at the heart of the Labor project: pursuing jobs for South Australians. Jobs are the thing that give people dignity and purpose. It is the greatest social welfare mechanism to give a job for a family, and we put that at the heart of our political project, and we do not give up on it just because there are difficult times.

South Australians know that they have carved out a place for themselves in a very harsh natural environment, and they have always done that with their ingenuity, their drive and their capacity to find new ways of achieving things. Nothing is handed to us on a platter. I think we had a fantastic example of that recently over the River Murray, when we had to stand up and fight for what we got. I know those opposite—

Mr Whetstone interjecting:

The SPEAKER: I call the member for Chaffey to order.

The Hon. J.W. WEATHERILL: To answer the member for Chaffey, 'What did we get?', we got 2,750 billion extra gigalitres of water. That's what we got, and we got that because we were prepared to stand up and fight. We chose—

Mr PISONI: Point of order: the question was about jobs. I know the Premier doesn't want to talk about jobs, but the question was about jobs.

The SPEAKER: The member for Unley will be seated. He will make his point of order, not an impromptu stump speech. The Premier.

The Hon. J.W. WEATHERILL: It is germane to the question because it is the difference between a conservative budget forecast and an objective that we are setting for ourselves as a state to strive for, and we make no apologies about striving for an ambitious objective because I can tell those opposite—

Mr Gardner interjecting:

The SPEAKER: I call the member for Morialta to order.

The Hon. J.W. WEATHERILL: —one fundamental truth about life is you can never achieve more than you set out to achieve. Those opposite want to set a very low bar for South Australia. They want to set—

Mr PENGILLY: Point of order, sir: debate.

The SPEAKER: I ask the Premier to supply information.

The Hon. J.W. WEATHERILL: Mr Speaker, I am explaining the qualitative difference between those two targets, and what I can say about them is this: we have set ourselves an ambitious objective for South Australia's future. We make no apologies for that. We will pursue that rigorously, and it stands in stark contrast to those opposite, who simply throw up their hands and hope.

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