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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 13 Hansard (2 December) . . Page.. 4251 ..

MRS CARNELL (Chief Minister and Minister for Business and Employment) (11.52): Mr Speaker, I wish to make a couple of brief points. Obviously, I have not had a chance to read the report at length, but I have listened to the debate. I was really interested in the report. There seem to be some parts of the report that say that we have gone too fast and made decisions too quickly and other parts of the report that say that we have gone too slowly and should have made decisions more quickly. That might mean that we made them at about the right speed, on average.

The thing that I was most interested in was Mr Whitecross's comments about cooperation with New South Wales, particularly the south-east region of New South Wales. As I think everybody, except those opposite, would realise, our cooperation with the south-east region is now better than it has ever been as a result of the Leaders Forum.

Mr Berry: It has been around for years, Kate.

MRS CARNELL: The Leaders Forum is actually a new forum. It is working extremely well. The thing that I found most interesting was the view that the committee seemed to have that somehow, if we cooperated closely with New South Wales, we would be able to work together to encourage businesses to come to the ACT and the south-east region of New South Wales. It is a lovely idea, I have to say; but there are two things that would have to be achieved. First and foremost, Mr Berry would have to meet Mr Carr. That is something that is pretty important if you are to have cooperation.

The second most important thing is to have a significant change of heart by the New South Wales Government. I will just give an example, and there are many. Members would be aware of the great success of the Youth500 program. Youth500 is now up to something in the vicinity of 473 jobs.

Mr Berry: How many of them employed by government departments?

MR SPEAKER: Order! Stop interjecting, Mr Berry.

MRS CARNELL: Thank you. Mr Speaker, over 470 of the 500 Youth500 positions have already been taken up. It was obvious quite a number of weeks ago that this was going to be a very successful scheme. We were getting a lot of requests from young people over the border for Youth500 packages. Of course, it is funded by the ACT taxpayer. Therefore, we believed that they should go to ACT young people. But I wrote to the Premier of New South Wales, Mr Carr, which I regularly do - as he has said, I actually meet with him regularly as well - and suggested to him that it would be a really good idea to extend Youth500 to Youth1000 and make it applicable to the whole of the national capital region.

We were happy to put forward some extra dollars, over and above the $500,000 we had already put in, because we believe the scheme is such a success. The mayors and the regional leaders in the area were very keen to give it a go. The benefits of the scheme were that a number of the organisations, such as the Chamber of Commerce, already cover the region. Our advertising media also cover the region. So, there were lots of benefits in doing this. The answer, of course, was a resounding, "Not interested", which is pretty interesting, taking into account the success of the program.

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