Julia Gillard (Lalor, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

I was, of course, responding to the fact that UK research was cited in the question. On the question of jobs in Australia, I refer the member to the Treasury modelling which shows that to 2020 we will see 1.6 million jobs created in this country. We will see people in jobs. There is nothing more important to this government than people being in jobs. That is why we reacted so swiftly during the global financial crisis, and we were distressed to see that the opposition did not want to support the work of Australians during that crisis. It is why, as we move to a clean energy future, our focus is on jobs and the creation of jobs—1.6 million jobs by 2020. As the Minister for Regional Australia, Regional Development and Local Government has just outlined and as the Minister for Climate Change and Energy Efficiency outlined a little bit earlier in question time, there are jobs in this clean energy future. There are new jobs—jobs that we cannot imagine now but that people will do in the future. In the same way, with the information technology revolution when it first started, people would not have foreseen that there would be jobs in being a blogger; people would not have foreseen there would be jobs at an entity like Google.

Dr Jensen interjecting—

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