Joel Fitzgibbon (Hunter, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

They have been wonderful to work with—absolutely. So it is an overwhelming success. People can sit back and criticise, of course, when you are spending so much money so quickly—remembering that, as I heard the member for Shortland say, this was an economic stimulus package first and a schools program second. It was a good choice to spend the money on schools, because that is where it was needed most. If you are rolling out money that quickly, of course there are going to be examples of mistakes, cost overruns et cetera and maybe, in a small number of cases, value for money not being delivered—the Orgill report has identified those—but overwhelmingly the program has been fantastic and has worked well.

That leads me to my electorate. Like any electorate, my local area has many challenges, and I will go through some of them. Interestingly, our biggest challenge now, in my view, is the tightness of our labour market. If someone had told me when I was first elected in 1996 that the Hunter region’s unemployment rate would be five per cent in my lifetime, I would have laughed at them. Maybe I need to be more ambitious, but I could never have conceived it. It is ironic that, in my view, one of the biggest challenges facing the region now is to ensure that we do not fall short on the skills front and, in fact, on the labour participation front. I was talking just last week to a local publican. As you do, I said, ‘How’s it going, mate?’ He said, ‘It’s going well, but my biggest problem is that I can’t get staff.’ Despite having an unemployment rate around five per cent, we still have these huge pockets of unemployment, typically among young people who lack the skills and wherewithal to take up these job opportunities, and still among some more mature former blue-collar workers. This is the biggest challenge for government in our local region.

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