Tanya Plibersek (Sydney, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Human Services) Share this | Hansard source

I will be very brief because I know the next minister has arrived and is wanting to talk about his portfolio. We chose 10 regions that had, for example, a high proportion of highly disadvantaged job seekers, a high youth unemployment rate and a high number of people on disability support benefits or other benefits. We wanted a balance of city and regional areas. We will look at this very intensive new approach as perhaps being appropriate for rolling out more broadly in the future. We wanted to have a balance of different types of communities so that we could be sure that the approach that we are taking works both in cities, rural, regional and suburban areas. As I say, the focus was on not only communities with a high number of disadvantaged job seekers but also communities where there is already a really strong culture of pulling together, where there are strong non-government organisations, where there is a strong culture of the community actually taking responsibility and working with employers, looking for opportunities and where there is an opportunity to build on the strengths of those communities. We wanted statistics that related to not only unemployment but also communities where there was a lot of existing social capital.

Proposed expenditure agreed to.

Sustainability, Environment, Water, Population and Communities Portfolio

Proposed expenditure, $2,170,915,000

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