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House of Assembly - Fifty-Second Parliament, Second Session (52-2)
2013-11-14 Daily Xml
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YOUTH UNEMPLOYMENT

Mr MARSHALL (Norwood—Leader of the Opposition) (14:29): My supplementary question is of course to the Premier. Why were there 1,000 more unemployed youths in northern Adelaide during the month of October, an increase of 77 per cent on the September figure?

The Hon. J.W. WEATHERILL (Cheltenham—Premier, Treasurer, Minister for State Development, Minister for the Public Sector, Minister for the Arts) (14:30): The northern suburbs of South Australia have been most affected by the structural adjustment that I described earlier. We are, on any view of it, because of the way in which our economy is structured, a First World economy. We pay decent wages; we have good safety standards; we have high environmental standards. In relative terms, that makes us a jurisdiction that cannot claim to be a low-cost jurisdiction, and we would not be interested in competing with low-cost jurisdictions for those cheap jobs that are labour intensive.

We must go up the economic food chain if we are going to have a future for ourselves and our families. I know those opposite are fond of the Playford era, but somehow going back there and trying to compete on the basis of cheap land, cheap water, cheap energy and cheap labour costs is not available to us. If that is your only solution for the future of South Australia, it is a solution that is a dead end—an absolute dead end.

Mr Whetstone: What's your solution?

The Hon. J.W. WEATHERILL: My solution is to make sure that we go up the value chain in areas like yours—the Riverland—where we are investing in making sure that we add value to food and fibre, where we are making sure that we add value to our advanced technological offerings here in South Australia, where we have a future manufacturing sector where we leverage off a car industry and all the associated work that flows from that sector. These are the opportunities in front of us. The greatest threat to youth unemployment in South Australia is the threat of the closure of Holden's.

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