Christopher Pyne (Sturt, Liberal Party, Minister for Education) Share this | Hansard source

They could have been refunded—the member for Shortland is correct—but the government's decision was that myfuture and Job Guide would not be continued to be funded after 2014-15. We did that, firstly, because we are in a budget emergency which requires us to make difficult decisions about what should and should not continue to be funded. Secondly, we did that because, with respect to those two particular measures that some students use to decide their careers and their futures, there is a plethora of information now available for young people, particularly provided by the private sector. Therefore the question has to be whether the government should be spending taxpayers' money on myfuture and the Job Guide when the private sector has been filling that space extremely successfully for the last 10 years. For example, there is information about careers on state and territory websites—Victoria and Western Australia have their own dedicated career websites, two state government portals for advising young people about their careers. But other examples in the private sector include Seek, CareerLounge, My Career, Career Hunter, Student Edge, SkillsOne and Hobsons Course Finder. So there are many different places that students can get the advice that they need about future careers. Of course, young people these days use social networking, social media, to find out a great deal about the careers that they might wish to pursue. So I am confident that the myfuture and job guide will be quite correctly replaced by the private sector filling that space, as they have already been doing in the last 10 years, and I think that for the use of taxpayers' funds where the private sector is doing a job equally or better than the government, it is the wrong use of taxpayers' funds to replicate what the private sector can do as well if not better.

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