Amanda Vanstone (SA, Liberal Party, Minister for Immigration and Multicultural Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

The point I wanted to make, Mr President, is the same point I was making to Senator Wong, and it is not widely understood in Australia, and that is that during the recession that Labor said we had to have there was a desperate situation of businesses closing down and laying off people they could lay off. And who did get laid off? A lot of apprentices. In fact, a lot of the training money and apprenticeship money spent by the Labor government was for subsidies to keep apprentices on, because if they had not paid subsidies apprentices would have lost their jobs, and many of them did.

I thank the senator for reminding me of this. It will give me the opportunity to go back and check the Hansard that I have been looking at in the last couple of months to remind myself—and I may take the opportunity to come and remind the Senate—of the remarks made by Mr Beazley at the time acknowledging that when you so run an economy that you lead into the ‘recession we had to have’ and you have nearly a million Australians out of work, with some of the highest unemployment rates anyone in this chamber has ever seen, you necessarily change the focus of your training money. What it does not mention in theHansard are the very substantial cuts to training under Labor. I cannot imagine how Mr Beazley can stand up in front of the Australian media and say that he is going to train Australians and he is going to train them now when the last time he had the job that is not what he did.