Nigel Scullion (NT, Country Liberal Party, Minister for Indigenous Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

First of all, I thank Senator Williams for the question and particularly thank him for helping me engage with many of his Indigenous communities in New South Wales. It was very important that we had a clear agenda. We said, 'We want to get kids into school, we want to get adults into work and we want to have safe communities.' So, quite clearly, placing Indigenous employment front and centre on our agenda was very important.

And I would like to say to those on the other side—and I know they may be bracing themselves, but in fact this is a bit of a compliment—that whilst their programs were completely messy, with the churn of change and training for training's sake, they were starting off a reform. You get it wrong in reform, so what we have done is taken those things that did work—we all know what worked and what did not work—and we have built on them.

I think it is very important to recognise that getting into a job simply is the best form of welfare—or to move away from welfare. We all know that in anyone's life actually being able to say to someone, 'I have a job; I am independent; I am doing well,' is just so very important.

The other notion about why it was that we went away from training for training's sake—apart from the obvious issues—is that communities and individuals were saying: 'This just isn't working for us. We're getting trained, and we might be getting trained in good things, but for the things we are getting trained in there aren't any actual jobs. They might come past but they're not actually in the context of the employment space, which is just so very important.'

So we said that not only would we move away from training for training's sake but we would provide 5,000 jobs, and that is exactly what we did. They were not training jobs; they were 5,000 jobs. I had the great pleasure of being in Sydney and announcing those 5,000 jobs. Now, 70 per cent of those jobs that we announced with the Prime Minister, importantly, were those B- and C-class—those people having the most difficulty getting into jobs. This is a remarkable success. I commend this process to those opposite— (Time expired)