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House of Assembly - Fifty-Second Parliament, Second Session (52-2)
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EMPLOYMENT FIGURES

Mr MARSHALL (Norwood—Leader of the Opposition) (14:28): My question is to the Premier. Why does the Premier continue to say that the northern suburbs youth full-time unemployment rate of 44.6 per cent is, and I quote, 'a meaningless statistic', when there are 2,000 full-time unemployed young people in Adelaide's northern suburbs according to the ABS?

The Hon. J.W. WEATHERILL (Cheltenham—Premier, Treasurer, Minister for State Development, Minister for the Public Sector, Minister for the Arts) (14:28): Because we have outlined this on numerous occasions: it is a completely misleading way to describe the extent of the problem. It is not to minimise the importance of the challenge of meeting the needs of young people in the north, but it is utterly inappropriate to be running around with the number of 44 per cent and comparing it with national unemployment rates of around 5 or 6 per cent and trying to extrapolate from that. It is deliberately attempting to create a picture which is far worse than the true picture is in the northern suburbs.

The truth is that many of those young people are in jobs, many of them are in training, and many of them are in school where you'd expect them to be at that age. So the pool of people who are looking for work is correspondingly so much smaller. On your statistics it is in the order of about 5,000 people. It is an absurd proposition to promote this in some comparison with the national unemployment rate and suggest that there is a massive crisis of that sort. What we are doing on this side of the house is making sure that many more of those young people are in school. When they left office—the previous mob—what they had was—

Mr Marshall interjecting:

The Hon. J.W. WEATHERILL: Well, these are the facts. You want information; here's information.

The SPEAKER: The Premier—

Mr PISONI: Point of order—

The SPEAKER: No, I don't need the assistance of the member for Unley. The Premier will not refer to Her Majesty's opposition as—

Mr Marshall: Loyal opposition, sir.

The SPEAKER: —loyal opposition—as the 'other mob' and he will not give us a history lesson on the performance of when they were last in government.

Mr Griffiths interjecting:

The SPEAKER: While I have this pause, I am weary of the member for Goyder's soliloquy. Would you please stop. I call you to order. Premier.

The Hon. J.W. WEATHERILL: Thank you, Mr Speaker. The day after we attained government, we were visited with school participation rates of the order of 69 per cent. Sixty-nine per cent of students were completing year 12. We have now lifted that to 89 per cent, so I can tell you what a number of those young people are doing: they are in school where they belong, preparing themselves for the jobs that we know that exist in the future, not the shrinking billabong of jobs which exist for those young people who do not actually have the skills and the capabilities to meet the needs of a modern economy. What we have decided to do is equip these young people with opportunities, so that they can seize their future. We were not prepared to allow almost a third of them to actually sit there with a shrinking level of opportunities. That is the focus of this government; that will continue to be our focus.

Mr MARSHALL: Supplementary, sir.

The SPEAKER: Yes, supplementary.

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