Kevin Hogan (Page, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

Talking about jobs, I was thinking earlier of a children's nursery rhyme which I am sure you have heard, Deputy Speaker. I am sure most people in the chamber would have heard the rhyme about the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker. Wouldn't we love it if there were some butchers and some bakers—the Greens are not here; otherwise there might be some candlestick makers—on the other side? What do we have on the other side? We do not have the butcher; we have the union official. We do not have the baker; we have the political staffer. We do not have the candlestick maker; we have the lawyer. There is nothing wrong with those three professions, but wouldn't it be lovely to have a bit of diversity? Wouldn't it be lovely to have a butcher, a baker and a candlestick maker instead of the union official, the political staffer and the lawyer? That would help them have a bit of creative thought about new jobs and creating the jobs of the future.

The new jobs of the future are important, as history has shown. If we go back 100 years, there were no jobs in our economy that would have had anything to do with electricity. Electricity was being invented; it was a new concept. If we go back 20 or 30 years, there were no jobs that had anything to do with personal computers. If we go back just 15 or so years, there were not that many jobs that had anything to do with the internet. So jobs disappear, but jobs are created. How we prepare our students and incentivise our private sector today for the jobs of the future is very important. The other thing is that every student now at school will probably have four to five different careers over their life. No, they will not go from being a union official to being a staffer to being an MP. Those careers will transcend lots of different things.

So how do we prepare the education system and our private sector for these jobs? Unfortunately, it does not come from the 'in the box' thinking we get from the other side, where it is all about regulation and government solutions. Someone mentioned the curriculum earlier. It is not about content. It is not necessarily about teaching our students content all the time. I know a lot of teachers, and what we are doing with the new curriculum is not about what teachers teach students; it is about how we teach our students and our young people, because content can quickly become superseded and irrelevant. So we want to teach our students and our children about critical thinking. We want to teach them about problem solving. We want teachers who are delivering their content in an array of different ways, whether it be auditory, for the students who like to hear things; visual, for the student who is visual and likes to see how things are happening; or kinaesthetic, for students who just have to be doing things physically. So this is what we are about. We are about the fact that we want to engage our young students and our children and we want to teach them skills. It is not about content or regulation; it is about teaching them to be thinkers, and that is what we are doing.

Of course, we want to encourage private enterprise and business people to be involved in the jobs of the new economy. Others have mentioned the employee share ownership plan that was created by the previous government. What they did by killing off entrepreneurs in this country was just outrageous. As I think an earlier speaker suggested, we do not know what the jobs of the future are. Government does not know what the jobs of the future are. But we want to encourage our entrepreneurs, we want to encourage our private sector, to have a go because they will find out and they will fulfil the needs and wants that are created as our community and society changes.

Again, this is not about regulation. This government is not about regulating job creation; we are about liberating the private sector and they will do what they do best—they will create the jobs and the wealth that this country needs.

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