On with the job for industry leaders

By Bridget Cook
BUSINESSMAN Lindsay Fox and former ACTU secretary Bill Kelty kicked off a job forum road show in Dandenong on Tuesday in a bid to tackle unemployment.
The jobs workshop brought local community leaders, businesses and members of parliament together to address unemployment issues and ways to drum up job opportunities in the South East.
Dandenong was the first stop for the road show, headlined by Mr Fox and Mr Kelty, which will see 20 of Australia’s most disadvantaged areas visited in an attempt to work out local solutions to the global economic downturn.
Employment Participation Minister, Senator Mark Arbib, who initiated the scheme with his parliamentary secretary Jason Clare, said the government had set up local priorities areas that they believed were of higher risk of job losses and greater unemployment.
“Dandenong’s unemployment is at seven per cent and 34 per cent of the population is on Centrelink payments. This is above the national average. These are some of the reason that Dandenong was a priority area,” he said.
Local leaders were given the opportunity at the forum to bring up the issues they felt needed to be addressed. Some of these included to ensure that all the universities and training expertise were being used by the local community and tailoring apprenticeship guidelines to different workforces, but the focus was heavily on how they could best maximise the use of local manufacturers. Senator Arbib announced at the forum a $1.8 million investment in two projects which will generate about 250 jobs in the south-east.
$1.4 million was announced to Try Youth Services for a project that will employ and improve skills for job seekers by providing energy and water assessments and retro-fits to the community, and $374,000 to Scouts Australia, Victoria, for works at the Gilwell Park Environment Centre in Gembrook.