Michael Ferguson (Bass, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

If I had a choice between the two, would I choose a situation where we had hundreds of thousands of people, even a million people, looking for jobs or would I have jobs looking for people? That is what we have in this country. We have the Labor Party walking away from their record of the past. They choose to somehow relive the Hawke and Keating years as some sort of economic miracle. We know it was not. When I was in my high school years, growing up in a home with parents who were struggling with a 17 per cent home mortgage and youth unemployment that was so high, it was no joke and no laughing matter. Look at the record. There was 25.5 per cent youth unemployment in August 1992. At that stage there were fewer apprenticeships and there was an unmet demand for vocational and technical education places. That had reached 89,300 places in 1995, of which 69,400 were TAFE places. Skilled workers—and this is a fact—were simply unable to find jobs. Is that what we are looking for from the Labor Party today? Is that their new policy direction?

What is the greatest challenge today? Go to Ballarat or Launceston and ask any business. Ask any industry in the employment market what their greatest challenge is. They will tell you that the greatest challenge is finding people to take up skilled positions. Is this a failure of the government? The government is somehow supposed to instantly produce skilled workers when all of the people who are looking for work in the job market—and a majority under good economic management from this government—have been able to find themselves secure employment.

From what Labor is saying, the opposite is true. The government has not at all presided over a failure of policy. The opposite is true. The government’s great success story is all of the people who right now are too busy to even be listening to this debate. They are hard at work. They are in their workplaces. They may have the radio on in the corner, but they are busy making money for their employer, holding their job security for themselves, improving their job prospects for the future and carving out a future for themselves.

Important as the general area covered by this matter of public importance today is, it is an absolute ruse. The Labor Party have no credibility on this issue. They are crying crocodile tears. It is shallow politics designed simply to provide opposition to the government. It is a total walkaway from their own abject failure to train and skill Australia during the Hawke-Keating years of the 1980s and 1990s.

The fact is that the Howard government, having presided over a strong economy, is able to see its young people and its older people get into a fulfilling life and be able to secure employment. They are able to do so on the basis of the very successful vocational and skilling policies of this government.

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