Subjects: Work for the Dole
E&OE..................................
Thank you very much Mal the Minister for Employment Services, Tony Abbott the Minister for Employment, Workplace Relations and Small Business, Peter Shergold the Departmental Secretary, my other Parliamentary colleagues, ladies and Gentlemen. I'm delighted to be associated again with this achievement night, honouring those people who've contributed so much to the outstanding success of a programme which, I believe, has proved to be a new effective and encouraging way of coping with an age old difficulty and an age old social challenge. And that is reconnecting people who are out of work with the experience needed to give them the confidence and the skills and the capacity and most importantly the encouragement and the moral to become full time members of the workforce.
Work for the Dole was introduced in 1997 and it's been successful for three major reasons. It's been successful because it gives expression to Australian principles. It gives expression to the notion of encouraging people to be self-reliant. It's also been successful because its implementation involves encouraging different sections of the Australian community to pull together and work towards a common goal or a common cause. Also importantly it's been successful because it carries a label which everybody can understand. One of the more challenging things in modern society as it becomes increasingly more complicated and increasingly more intricate and detailed and technical is to find a way of communicating with one another about something in terms that everybody can understand.
I had a very strong view from the very beginning that we ought to introduce this scheme under the description of Work for the Dole. Because although in the eyes of some that was a politically incorrect way of describing something my very strong view, despite those reservations was something that everybody could understand. And in the end, communicating what you are on about in simple unmistakable terms is very important. And the people who have been the greatest advocates of Work for the Dole are in the main the 110,000 Australians who passed through it. Who have enjoyed, as a result of the experience that they have received in Work for the Dole programs, they have enjoyed a remarkable success rate in obtaining full time employment. They've not only got jobs but they've been given back self respect and hope and morale and encouragement.
And I've visited a lot of Work for the Dole projects and it really is very important that people who participate in those schemes do get a sense of satisfaction and a sense of well being. And I know a number of anecdotes have been delivered by Peter Shergold in the presentation he made tonight and certainly I read his speech in advance and certainly those anecdotes resonate very much with me.
We talk a lot quite properly in our society about the importance of economic achievement and economic efficiency. But of course economic achievement and economic efficiency are never ends in themselves, they are merely means to producing a happier and a more contented and a more fulfilled Australian society. And one of the things that is an absolutely essential ingredient to a more contented and more fulfilled Australian society is that we leave no stone unturned to provide every Australian man and women with an opportunity of playing a meaningful role in the Australian workforce.
Unemployment is a constant challenge, it's lower now than it used to be but it's higher than it ought to be. And we should never rest in the ceaseless quest to find new and better ways of getting people back to work. Economic growth is part of it but also giving people skills and giving people a sense of respect. And if you can do that by involving the community, if you can enlist the good will of individuals of a philanthropic bent, if you can utilise the skills and the understanding of the great welfare organisations of Australia and if you can involve the Government agencies, and I want to thank Peter Shergold and his department for the quite magnificent job that he and they have done in implementing the Work for the Dole scheme.
It's a great example of how our system of Government works. A new Government comes in and implements a completely new policy. A policy that was bitterly criticised by many when it was first mooted. A policy that had been explicitly rejected by earlier Governments of both political persuasions to their great credit and bureaucracy says right that's the policy of the Government, it's our responsibility to see that it works. And they have done that and they have discharged their responsibility in relation to that quite magnificently.
I also want in his presence to thank Tony Abbott for the work that he did specifically in relation to Work for the Dole in the time that he was Minister for Employment Services. Now I'm pretty proud of what's been done and the reason why I'm proud of what's been done is I think it's given meaning and hope and encouragement and restored faith to tens of thousands of mainly young Australians. And that really is the most worthwhile thing that any Government can do. That's a far more heart-warming thing than some kind of impressive economic figure or statistic. Because what you're dealing with here is you're dealing with human happiness and you're dealing with personal fulfilment and personal contentment and I think Work for the Dole is part of the many things that we try to do as a society to make people feel part of the nation in every sense of the word. To make people feel that they are important. To remind every individual that he or she has a place in our community. And Work for the Dole is part of the many things we do to achieve those goals. So I am delighted to be here, I'm delighted to thank and congratulate all of those involved and to wish well to everybody who will be involved in the year ahead. We hope to place something like 50,000 people in Work for the Dole during the current financial year and that is a measure of how the programme is going from strength to strength and I thank all of those who've contributed to that achievement most warmly.
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