Mr BILLSON —My question is to the Minister for Employment, Education, Training and Youth Affairs. Will the minister inform the House of the government's strategy to promote improved employment opportunities for disadvantaged job seekers? How do these strategies compare with other ideas being publicly canvassed?

Dr KEMP —I thank the member for Dunkley for his question and acknowledge his great interest in effective ways of helping unemployed people in his electorate. It is absolutely essential that we make changes to the arrangements that the Labor Party put in place for unemployed people because those policies were completely ineffective. I want to inform the House why the Labor Party programs for unemployed people were so ineffective and why they need to be replaced.

One of the major defects of those programs was that, by working solely through the CES, unemployed people had access to only 20 per cent of the job vacancies. There were 80 per cent of job vacancies that were not available to the 800,000 unemployed people that the CES was seeking to place. They were programs, as we know, that focused on process, not on getting jobs. Billions of dollars were paid out. None of those dollars were linked to unemployed people actually getting jobs. Job seekers were squeezed month after month, year after year into programs that had very poor job outcomes.

The unemployed people were disillusioned and demoralised by Labor's philosophy of training for training's sake. We know that the Labor Party intends to revive the $10 billion failed Working Nation program, but it is one of this government's real achievements that it is dismantling these Working Nation programs and putting into place effective programs to get unemployed people and disadvantaged unemployed people jobs.

The new employment service arrangements, which will commence on 1 May next year, will get more unemployed people into jobs and they will do that for a whole variety of reasons. One reason is that they will have access to many more job vacancies than were ever available to the CES. The multiple providers who will successfully tender in the current employment services market tender will have access to a whole range of job vacancies. For the first time, public dollars will be paid out when unemployed people get jobs—not when they are put into a training program, not when some process has been completed, but when they get a job. These reforms will be targeting the most disadvantaged job seekers.

The great difference between what this government is proposing and what the Labor government did is that we will be aiming to get the most disadvantaged job seekers into jobs, not into training programs. We will be employing the expertise which is available right through the community sector and the training market. They will provide tailored services. The rigid, fixed, bureaucratic Labor programs will be abandoned and job seekers will get the sort of assistance which is tailored to their needs to get jobs.

What does the opposition offer? It offers `active programs of assistance as previously implemented under Working Nation'. Its draft policy platform states that it is going to reinstate labour market job readiness programs. It is time for the Labor Party to realise that unemployed people in this country, disadvantaged unemployed people and the Australian community have given up on Working Nation. They want effective programs to help disadvantaged job seekers into jobs, and that is what the coalition will be putting in place.