Nigel Scullion (NT, Country Liberal Party, Minister for Community Services) Share this | Hansard source

I acknowledge that the senator is touching on employment in communities and we do need to maximise it where we can. We have taken the approach of encouraging higher rates of employment. There are a couple of reasons for that. Some of these community stores have only one employee. To suddenly make it prescriptive that that employee be a local individual would not in the short term bring about the outcomes that we require. But that is certainly not the norm. We have some special programs that will very much target store workers through some of the retail training packages. Why the notion of simply encouraging that to take place rather than being prescriptive? One of the great challenges about being prescriptive is that, if you do not have people who are trained, then it tends to backfire on you and the level of amenity that we are looking for may not be able to be achieved, particularly in the short term.