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

I would like to thank Senator Williams for his question and acknowledge his longstanding interest particularly in employment for Indigenous people in western New South Wales. I would like to also acknowledge this question on an important day, with the Prime Minister tabling the Closing the Gap statement in the other place. The Prime Minister spoke of the wonderful work we have been doing in employment programs, particularly with the 5,000 Indigenous jobseekers who have moved from welfare through the Vocational Training and Employment Centres, the VTEC program, into real jobs through that VTEC network. The most important thing to note is that these are not low-hanging fruit—75 per cent of the 5,000 people were what we refer to as stream C jobseekers, and they are the jobseekers with the greatest barriers to employment. The program was targeted not at the easy job seekers but the more difficult ones.

Take our Employment Parity Initiative. We are partnering with the largest employers—household names like Woolies, Accor, Crown Resorts, Transfield—and that new approach has seen us now employ 60 people of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander descent today and 60 people yesterday, and it will be 60 people tomorrow. Every single day, 60 jobs will be created for our first Australians. But to close the gap we are going to need an additional 188,000 Indigenous Australians in work by 2018. Employers and Indigenous job experts are who we need to speak to, and we have been speaking to an Indigenous Employment Forum with the Minister for Employment, Michaelia Cash, and people such as Jeremy Donovan and Laura Berry—absolute experts in Indigenous engagement and employment. Those are the sorts of people that are leading our policy to ensure that we close the gap in employment.