Simon Crean (Hotham, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Regional Development) Share this | Hansard source

I can certainly tell the member for Mackellar that the number of unemployed exceeded one million under the Fraser government, and that was one million unemployed in a lesser workforce so there was a higher proportion of unemployed under the government that John Howard was Treasurer in. That is what I can tell her. What I can also tell her is that we do not hide from the fact there was an unemployment problem under us, but we were prepared to do something about it. We were prepared to invest in getting people back into work—but not just in menial jobs; we were prepared to link them to effective accredited training.

I said before that under Working Nation I established the traineeship program and Netforce. It is very interesting to note that in Labor’s last year in office, in 1996, traditional apprentices—and I got these figures out of the library today—numbered in excess of 126,000. That was the figure just for traditional apprenticeships. They did not reach that figure again under this government until 2004. Almost eight years later, this government had stagnated. Despite the fact that there had been increasing prosperity and increasing economic growth, this government dumbed down the training system and did not produce one extra traditional apprenticeship training place. The government talks about the numbers, close to 400,000—

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