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PRIINMISET E
TRANSCRIPT OF OPENING REMARKS BY THE PRIME MINISTER,
THE HON P J KEATING, MP TO THE NATIONAL MEETING ON YOUTH
TRAINING AND EMPLOYMENT, PARLIAMENT HOUSE, CANBERRA
22 JULY 1992
E& OE PROOF COPY
Well thank you very much, I think we might call the
meeting to order. Could I begin by saying that I have
already had the pleasure of meeting most of you this
morning, as have my colleagues, but could I say formally
on their behalf and mine welcome to this meeting. It is
very gratifying to see you here and it is a reflection
of, I think, the concern that Australia feels at the
moment for unemployment, the problems which come with it
and particularly as the problem attends our young people.
We all know, I think, that unemployment in the kind of
society we have is not the shock absorber in the economic
system. We don't regard it as a buffer at the end of the
station, we don't believe that a group in a society
should carry the adjustment burden of any economy, in a
transition no matter how important or fundamental, that
that kind of policy approach is unacceptable, and that
the fairness and sense of equality and egalitarianism of
Australia as always deigned that everyone should have a
right to a job regardless of age. And it has been on
that basis that we have as a country operated.
Structural unemployment is of course not a new phenomena
for us or many other countries, but in the last ten or
fifteen years of quite rapid world change, change in
trade, and change in the structure of economies we have
seen this appear. And it is difficult to deal with it,
and we now have compounding that problem unemployment
coming from the cycle of the recession. We are now
emerging into recovery, but thie unemployment is still
with us. It is a social evil and we have got to do what
4e can to beat it, and as a Government, may I say, for
the years 1983, certainly up to 1990, we took the view
that unemployment had to be dealt with and that
employment should be an express outcome of policy, that
employment should not be simply a residual which falls
out the bottom of the growth numbers, but was an express
objective of policy. And that's why I think we have
progressed so far. That is, in the .' 80s we were able to
grow our labour market at about three times the pace of
most comparable countries, and why today the labour
market is still 25 per cent larger than it was in 1983.
But the fact is that growth stopped, unemployment has
risen, and we have now got to do all in our power to get
it down. Yesterday in respect of the fortunes of young
people and youth unemployment, we took I think a great
leap forward in what I think one can conscientiously
describe as an historic change. We arrived at an
agreement, the Commonwealths with the States, to
establish a National Training Authority, that is to make
another path-waayi n e-: idu6fii5ii-eh-Ybid-thit which we have
now through the tertiary system and through compulsory
education. Arnd as all of you who are interested in this
subject know, almost half of the kids who live school are
untrained. And part of the reason for that is that we
have never really had the structures in place to train
them. So, at least from the Governments' perspective,
Governments plural, we put our heads together and I think
came up with a cooperative model which will allow the
Commonwealth and the States to work together for the
benefit of Australian young people, and those mature age
students who will also find themselves in vocational
education. But I think today, that was yesterday, but
today I think we can do more. But we have to advance on
three fronts. Obviously growth is key to whatever we
might do and the economy is now growing again and we
shouldn't be too forlorn about its prospects, there's
every chance that in the year to June the economy will
grow by about 2 per cent. This compares with growth over
the same period in Europe of about 1.7. So we're doing
as well or better than comparable countries. We're not
growing as fast as parts of Asia but we are growing
certainly as fast or faster than Europe or North America.
In the coming year we expect to be growing much faster,
of the order of 4 per cent. And it is, as we all know,
GDP, growth, which pulls up employment. And when one
sees any graphic illustration of employment and growth,
they go together, one line with the other, whenever we
see a lift in GDP, in growth in output, we see a lift in
employment. The problem for us now is we're living with
the lag, the lag which comes from higher productivity,
more output being produced by fewer people, in the first
instance, to see employment pick up later. So growth is
the key, and no matter what we do here today, no matter
how clever we think some of our solutions may be, if the
growth isn't there of course it will retard our progress.
The second front, I think, is education and training.
And that goes right across thie -gammi-t oif the -' Estiem, ffr om
school, primary to secondary education, retention in
secondary education and as we've been prone to say
lately, we've taken that participation rate from 3 in
in 1983 to now 7 in 10 and we want to see that get to
9 in 10 before too much longer, and we've now very
rapidly and dramatically expanded higher education with a
per cent addition of tertiary places since the middle
1980s.
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The key now is to get that school to work transition into
place and to look at struciured training which can only
really come with the notion that the later teenage years
are years of vocational preparation, and where it's now
up to us to see that there are pathways between school
and work and that it's no longer acceptable for those of
us who are involved in society to take the view that half
of the school leavers can just meander their way through
a labour market untrained to find that opportunities are
denied them. So education and training, I think, is the
second front.
And the third front is to help the unemployed now. That
is, particularly those young people whose later teenage
years will precede the more fundamental transitions from
school to work, the more structured training arrangements
which are portended in the Carmichael Report and in other
places those people who are disadvantaged now, that's the
other front we have to work on to deal with the
unemployed now.
So we've invited you here today, each of you, because we
know you've already done things, and are doing things,
about these problems, about unemployment generally. And
particularly about unemployment for young people and
we're particularly gratified that we've had many young
people themselves participate in the process and give us
the benefit of their views which we will also see again
today, with further expression by them of their opinions.
For the Government's part, we will listen attentatively
to what's said. The process of national meetings on
points of difficulty in society, has been I think a good
one over the last decade or so, and it does give
governments a chance to listen to what the community has
to say and fashion policy accordingly. So we will
listen, we'll take note, we've got a reasonable structure
in our own ideas already, as would be obvious, but we
want to try and assimilate some of the views which are
put today with those ideas and to produce a structure of
value. So the Government will not be responding today, because
to do so would be to not take the views of people
seriously because obviously they can't be considered at
the same time as they're being put. But we will respond
next week, after we digest what has been put today and
when we have the time, the thinking time and the time to
structure a response, a sensible response and to
structure a response sensibly.
So could I just say, I conclude on those remarks again by
saying it's very gratifying to see you here.
Thank you very much for coming. We'll be having an open
session this morning of about, I think, five speeches
including my own, two from two young people representing
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the Australian Youth Policy and Action Coalition
Delegation, one from the ACTU, from Bill Kelty and
another from Eric Mayer the chair of the Business in the
Community for Young People and following those speeches
we will then move into closed session, where we can have
a general discussion, and I think, take other
presentations. So with those few words I think we'll move the agenda on
and I might ask now Miss Belinda Cant to address the
meeting. ENDS