Page 5830 - Week 14 - Tuesday, 7 December 2010
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there have not been any short, sharp shocks to our own spending—indeed, the contrary. Our additional investment into the private sector—and you can look back through the data, and I know Mr Smyth will reluctantly accept this at some point in his life—shows that the approach that we took to invest in capital, to increase the spend that we did to support private sector employment, I think, is reaping the benefits now.
I do not want to say we are at full employment but we are getting pretty close to it. Over the past year, 6,000 jobs have been created and I think, at some point, we will have to acknowledge the role that the ACT government has played in keeping our economy strong in ensuring that jobs have been created through perhaps what has been the most difficult economic times this country has experienced for many years.
MR SPEAKER: Mr Hargraves, a supplementary question?
MR HARGREAVES: Thank you very much, Mr Speaker. Treasurer, can you please advise the Assembly on how many jobs have been created in the ACT in the last year or so, despite the negative comments from those opposite?
MS GALLAGHER: I thank Mr Hargreaves for the supplementary question. The current unemployment rate is the lowest in the ACT, at three per cent. We have the second highest participation rate and we are seeing the number of unemployed persons, in trend terms, decreasing for 10 consecutive months.
Over the past year the number of unemployed persons in the ACT has declined by 1,300. The ACT has the second highest annual employment growth, at 2.6 per cent. What we can see from the data is that over the past year 6,000 jobs have been created in the ACT. Breaking that down along gender lines, 55 per cent of all new job holders are female and 45 per cent are male.
So what we have seen is that, even during a very tight labour market with a 12-month average unemployment rate of around 3.4 per cent, the ACT has created new employment and new employment opportunities for Canberrans. I think, as an Assembly, we should be welcoming that data.
At the industry level, the private sector contributed three-quarters of all of the new jobs created in the territory through the year to the August quarter 2010. So you can see that 5,400 jobs were added to the ACT private sector. I think what that also reflects is the fact that public sector growth has been kept to a minimum. That has been a deliberate decision of both the ACT government and the commonwealth government. We have had to restrain our own spending and our own growth in order to make sure we had the capacity to support jobs outside of the public sector and also be mindful of the budget pressures that exist in terms of recovering our own budget and not wanting to exacerbate them further.
Mr Speaker, after 18 months post the worst of the GFC, we can see that the ACT economy has held up very well. We have seen private sector growth. Some of that—even a tiny bit of that—has to be put down to decisions of the government, and supported by the Assembly.
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