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House of Assembly - Fifty-Second Parliament, Second Session (52-2)
2013-03-21 Daily Xml
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YOUTH UNEMPLOYMENT

Mr MARSHALL (Norwood—Leader of the Opposition) (14:31): My question is to the Premier. Why has the full-time youth unemployment rate reached 44.6 per cent in northern Adelaide, up from 30 per cent this time last year?

The Hon. J.W. WEATHERILL (Cheltenham—Premier, Treasurer, Minister for State Development, Minister for the Public Sector, Minister for the Arts) (14:31): We have been through this nonsense time and time again. The truth is that the youth unemployment rate in the context of young people staying on at school is an almost meaningless statistic. If you go to the number of young people who are actually unemployed as a proportion of young people who are looking for jobs or looking for employment and looking for training or are at school, you see of the total population it sits in a very similar band to the general population of unemployed people. The truth is there are just so few people in the category of looking for work in that age group that the absolute numbers we are talking about are relatively small. The statistics—

Mr Pisoni: What are they?

The Hon. J.W. WEATHERILL: I will provide the numbers to you, but they are very small numbers. They do not give a picture of unemployment amongst young people in the northern suburbs, because most of those young people are where you would expect them to be: that is, at school or in training or in employment. One of the reasons that that is the case is that we have now got 89 per cent of our young people actually at school until year 12.

The reason we have almost 90 per cent of our young people at school until year 12 is that we targeted that with specific policies to make sure that our young people had every possible chance of completing their schooling. It fell to as low as 67 per cent under those opposite. So, almost a third of young people were actually confined to a future where they did not have the necessary skills to permit them to actually make a success in the world. We know that the jobs of the future—we knew it then and we know it now, and it is even more important now—require at least 12 years of schooling, and in many respects much more than that.

So, this nonsense that somehow—they trot out these statistics as though they mean something. When they had a chance to do something about these matters they were an abject failure. We are not only addressing the real and imperative needs of young people in the north by making sure that they have the training and the skills they need to succeed in this world but we are also giving them the employment opportunities to succeed. This government has a proud record of delivering to the north. If you want to know what would have been the most devastating impact on the north, it would have been if the Leader of the Opposition had got his way and we had not supported Holden to ensure they had an economic future.

The SPEAKER: Is the Premier quite finished?

The Hon. J.W. WEATHERILL: Yes.

Members interjecting:

The SPEAKER: The last sentence was out of order, and I call the members for Morphett and Unley to order, and I warn the members for Morialta and Hammond for the first time.

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