The Weatherill Government will review the targets laid out in its Strategic Plan in the coming months, as the Premier concedes he “can’t rule out” the prospect of lurching into double digit unemployment.

Jay Weatherill has revealed the assumptions underpinning his 10 economic priorities, unveiled with fanfare a year ago, will be revisited, admitting his Government was powerless to directly influence some of his key benchmarks.

“These are not government targets: they are targets for the whole of the state,” he told parliament last week.

“There are things here that we cannot directly influence as a state government. We don’t export; we don’t create jobs directly in the mining sector… what we do is try to facilitate the creation of jobs in that sector.”

He said a series of “near-term targets” that laid out benchmarks to measure the plan’s effectiveness would be assessed, both “by the end of this year” and “just before the next state election” in March 2018.

“We did that, some would say, ‘courageously’, in the Yes Minister sense of the word, to hold ourselves accountable for the performance of this state,” Weatherill said.

“It may well be that we’re going to have to adjust some of our three-year targets…when the assumptions underpinning a target change, then it is sensible to review the target.”

The Premier said while some targets will be “reviewed upwards”, others “such as the mining jobs target… will be reviewed downwards”.

Weatherill has already acknowledged a previously-stated ambition to create 5000 new mining jobs by 2017 was untenable in light of plummeting commodity prices and wholesale cutbacks by companies such as BHP and Alinta.

He lamented the Opposition’s “gleeful prediction that we will be reaching double digit unemployment”, but when asked if he could rule it out, replied: “No, we can’t.”

“It’s going to be a massive challenge to avoid it,” he said.

“It’s going to be a massive challenge to do better than where we are at the moment, but that is the goal that we’ve set ourselves and what we will do is review each of those targets, because they’re powerful targets, as a goad to action for the South Australian community as we seek to transform and adjust this economy from an old economy to a new economy where the jobs are growing.”

The phrase “a goad to action” was coined and used often by Weatherill’s predecessor Mike Rann to describe his own State Strategic Plan benchmarks, first outlined in 2004.