Dr KEMP (Minister for Schools, Vocational Education and Training and Minister Assisting the Minister for Finance for Privatisation)(3.14 p.m.) —Mr Deputy Speaker, unemployment is certainly one of Australia's greatest social problems. It is probably the single most damaging legacy of the previous government. The previous government showed itself absolutely unable to address the problem and to provide Australians with real jobs. It spent taxpayers' money, money earned by the hard work of the working families of this country, and it spent that money like water in an attempt to solve the problem through government schemes, mickey mouse training schemes and by churning the long-term unemployed through these schemes to redefine them as short-term unemployed. It tried every stratagem in the book but it was unable to make any significant progress whatever.

In the last six years of the Labor government's administration, the net additional full-time jobs that it created numbered 7,100. And the member for Batman (Mr Martin Ferguson) has the effrontery to get up in this House, after 13 years of atrocious policy failure, to criticise this government for not solving, in 12 months, the problem that they left. At no stage throughout those 13 years did the Labor government attempt to address the fundamental reasons for unemployment in this country. I will go through those fundamental reasons one by one and look at Labor's failure on each one. They were full of rhetoric then; they are full of rhetoric now.

The fact is that there has been job creation since the last election. In fact, employment in Australia now is the highest it has ever been. There are more people in jobs now in this country than there have ever been at any previous time in Australia's history. We do not claim that that is good enough. We do not go around the country trumpeting that fact and pretending that somehow or other that solves the unemployment problem; we know that there are fundamental issues that need to be addressed, that are being addressed by this government, that were not addressed for 13 years.

Firstly, policies need to be put in place that will encourage Australians to save and invest in job creation. No government in Australia's history did more to destroy savings than the Labor government. Over the last six years they accumulated something like $70 billion worth of deficits: $70 billion they did not have, they spent. And did that produce jobs? Did that produce a prosperous economy? Did that revive small business? Did it bump up investment?

No, of course it did not. It destroyed jobs because it pushed up interest rates to some of the highest real interest rates in the world. They drove small business bankruptcies to record levels. They imposed on small business industrial relations laws which absolutely bound and tied the enterprises of this country so they could not invest and have confidence in employing people. They put in place an unfair dismissals law that discouraged small businesses from taking on full-time employees. They thought they could solve unemployment by spending, but they could not.

In that respect, of course, they were being absolutely true to Labor Party tradition, because that is exactly what Labor has always done. It is what they did under Whitlam; it is what they did under Hawke; it is what they did under Keating, and it is what they still want to do because they will not face up to the fact that, unless you create an environment in which small business is willing to create jobs, you will not solve the unemployment problem.

I will digress a moment to say that last week I had the honour of speaking on behalf of, and to acknowledge the achievements of, Bert Kelly, the former member for Wakefield. Bert was known in this House for his wit in puncturing the pretensions of the hypocrites on the other side of the House. On one occasion he asked this question of Jim Cairns as Treasurer:

Last week the Treasurer told us about his policy of using deficit financing to lower the present level of unemployment. How is this solution of burying unemployment under a mountain of money actually working out?

Bert Kelly wondered:

If printing money is a good solution for the unemployment problem, why not print more of the stuff and get rid of the unemployment problem altogether?

Kelly recalled this—and it is from his book, One More Nail , at page 188:

And Jim Cairns, with his kind heart brimming over with love and affection, just could not resist agreeing with me and replied that that was just what the government had in mind.

And many keen political observers pinpoint the beginning of Cairns's decline from that point.

Here are his successors—not one, but two of them—the two big spenders, the believers in deficit financing, the member for Hotham (Mr Crean) and the member for Batman. The member for Hotham is the person who probably spent more money on labour market programs than anyone—churning the unemployed through, trying to redefine them as short-term unemployed and not offering them any real jobs. No-one in this parliament has ever had so much experience in spending other people's money to achieve nothing as has the member for Hotham, the man who has pretensions to becoming the leader of the Labor Party.

Sitting next to him is his clone, the member for Batman, who berates the government today for its failure to deal with this problem. The member for Batman has plans to spend even more money. He has plans to ensure that there will be absolutely unlimited access to the labour market services provided by government. That is why he criticises this government—because we are not planning to provide unlimited access to these services. The Labor Party in government—not even under the member for Hotham—did not provide unlimited access, but the member for Batman thinks that there should be unlimited access. He is prepared to spend not merely $2 billion but maybe $4 billion or $6 billion, and all of that money will come out of Australian small business. He is not going to get it all through the tax system but, to the extent that he does, it will come out of the pockets of battling families. To the extent that he borrows to get it, it will push up interest rates and we will be back in that whole destructive cycle the Labor Party was responsible for that has left this country with the unemployment problem that it now has.

These schemes that they put in place to address unemployment, because they had no way of creating real jobs, were tremendously destructive of the morale of those who went through them. Of course, the member for Hotham knows that very well because he attended, as I did, the Jobs for Young Australians conference in South Australia in August last year. There was one very clear message that was given by the hundreds of young people at that conference and that was, `Stop putting us through Simon Crean's short-term training programs. We do not all want to be horticulturalists. We are not all interested in the history of dance in this country. We do not see careers in that. We want training that leads to real jobs.'

That is our commitment, and that is why we have picked up that great historic program, the apprenticeship program, which Labor, at the behest of its union mates, did so little about. Of course, the member for Hotham and the member for Batman know all about that because they were the union mates. They have come out of the closet and they are sitting there now trying to sell us the same old snake oil medicine that the Australian people rejected at the election last year. They so despised the traditional apprenticeship system and did so little that in 1995 the number of young people in apprenticeships and traineeships as a proportion of the work force was the lowest for three decades. We have put in place the foundations of a new national apprentice system which will—

Mr Martin Ferguson —Which equals traineeships. Traineeships equals new apprenticeships.

Dr KEMP —Which does not equal traineeships, although I fully recognise the fact that traineeships are an important thing in this. You simply put in place, after 10 years, the beginnings of a traineeship system and there were very, very few people in that system when you left office. You had 13 years to address this problem and you did not address it successfully.

The new Australian apprenticeship and traineeship system will provide young people with quality training not just in the traditional trades but in a whole range of new industries: in communications, in information technology, in the finance industry. It will build up the status of traineeships and we, for the first time, will provide school students in the senior secondary years with the opportunity to move straight from school into those quality training opportunities. Indeed, under the reforms we are putting in place, they will be able to begin traineeships and apprenticeships in school. It will be a national system, with national qualifications, nationally recognised—

Mr Martin Ferguson —We started it.

Dr KEMP —Which you never put in place—which will provide opportunities that young people in this country are looking for. One has to say that the member for Batman is probably—and I say this with full deference to the member for Hotham—the greatest snake oil salesman of them all, because if you asked him what his proposal is to provide jobs you come down to schemes like job sharing.

Mr Martin Ferguson —And industry policy.

Dr KEMP —Oh, and industry policy! We can see the labels on the snake oil bottles along the Labor Party policy shelf there.

Mr Martin Ferguson —Where do you stand on tariffs?

Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER (Mr Nehl) —Order! The member for Batman has already had his say.

Dr KEMP —He could take any of them off the shelf. But let us just have a look at what the Labor Party thought about job sharing in government in former years when we were in opposition. In December 1993 the discussion paper `Restoring Full Employment', commissioned and published by the Keating government, said that job sharing may, in some cases, increase employment in the short term but leads to a poorer long-term employment result, primarily because it lowers overall productivity levels and, therefore, per capita incomes. That was the conclusion of the policy analysts of the Labor Party when they were in government. They were not proposing job sharing at that time. The Sydney Morning Herald , on 6 February of this year, reported:

The ALP's largest affiliate union, AMWU, has come out strongly against a proposal by the federal opposition—

that is by the member for Batman, the shadow minister for employment—

to encourage job sharing, arguing: `It will not support the sharing of poverty.'

That, of course, is precisely what the member for Batman does support. That is what job sharing amounts to: the sharing of poverty. They have given up on creating real jobs. They have no idea how to create real jobs, so they say, `Let us share around the jobs we have currently got; let us take away a third or a half of the jobs of people currently in employment and give them to somebody else.' It is the kind of nonsense that the Australian people hear from the Labor Party.

Of course the reason they are hearing this nonsense is that there is no policy direction in the Labor Party. The Labor Party have no idea whatever where to go. They do not know what to do about work for the dole. They do not know what to do about employment. They are wandering around in the darkness clutching at anything, because in the end they have a leadership which has no purpose and direction. They have weak leadership. The only person who thinks there might be a job for himself out of that weak leadership is none other than the member for Hotham. Job sharing is something he is right into, and he would like to share 100 per cent of that job as soon as possible.