Jason Clare (Blaxland, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Communications) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This Thursday in Bankstown there will be a jobs expo. This is a very simple idea. It brings together employers who have jobs and unemployed people who are looking for a job—it will put them in the one room to help fill those jobs. It is like a jobs supermarket. Is a very simple idea, and it is an idea that works. It is what we did during the global financial crisis. I was Parliamentary Secretary for Employment at the time, and we held 29 of these jobs expos across the country in areas that had been hardest hit by the GFC. As I said, it was a simple idea and it worked. We managed to help more than 12,000 people find a job through this very simple, basic, commonsense process. We also kept these jobs expos going after the GFC ended.

Unfortunately, one of the first decisions that the Abbott government made was to abandon this exercise. I use this opportunity to encourage Malcolm Turnbull to bring these jobs expos back. Fortunately, Canterbury Bankstown Council has continued to run jobs expos, after they were abandoned by this government, and they are now running their third jobs expo. So, if you live in Western Sydney and you are looking for a job, get down to Bankstown Library this Thursday between 9.30 am and 2.30 pm. There will be more than 1,000 jobs on offer and one of them could be the job you have been looking for.