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

I just loved the contribution from the member for Capricornia. It reminded me very much of the member for Jagajaga’s contribution, all of which was read from a prepared speech. There was not a hell of a lot of imagination injected into it. It was all politically contrived, yet the tail-end of it seemed to suggest that it was the government that was attempting to score petty political points and grandstanding.

It is unfortunate and it is a little difficult, perhaps even a little unsustainable, for Labor to come into the House of Representatives to lecture a minister—indeed, the government; indeed, the House—on the government’s record. As the Minister for Defence, the former minister for education, has been singled out a few times, I thought I would bring into the House a clipping of a very well-known article published in the Sunday Herald Sun in 1992, because the Minister for Defence very often quotes from it. The editorial is headed ‘A national disgrace’. It reads:

Welcome to the lucky country. University graduates are begging for unpaid jobs just to get experience in the workplace. Sacked apprentices are offering their services for nothing in return for a chance to finish their trade training. Welcome to the lucky country. Youth unemployment is an open sore on the face of Australian society, its odour touching everyone. Welcome to the lucky country. A desperate father is offering to pay an employer $100 a week for three years to give his son an apprenticeship ... Welcome to nothing ... for that is what the young have inherited from probably the worst economic managers ever to sit on the Treasury benches in Canberra. The politicians should not squabble over the youth unemployment figures; they should hang their heads in shame. They have wounded young Australia. They have helped create disasters in the western suburbs of Melbourne and in regional cities, where one in two teenagers is out of work.

This article was written at a time when Australia was being brought to its knees by the people, now diminished in number because most of them have gone, who sit across from me now—people like the member for Jagajaga, who was involved in that government; people like the—

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