1. Hon ANNETTE KING (Deputy Leader—Labour) Link to this
to the Minister for Social Development and Employment
Does she stand by her statement that the Government has an “unrelenting focus on jobs and work”?
Hon BILL ENGLISH (Deputy Prime Minister) Link to this
The competent and hard-working Minister stands by her statement that the Government has an unrelenting focus on jobs and work.
If her unrelenting focus on jobs is working, why did 1,600 people apply for 110 jobs at Bunnings in Dunedin, 2,550 people apply for 150 jobs at a Mount Roskill supermarket, and 100 people in Tauranga apply for one receptionist job; and could the answer be that the focus has been “too little, too late” considering that unemployment went up by another 19,000 in the last quarter?
This Government feels sorry, in many respects, for all those job applicants. They used to have jobs but those jobs were based on excessive Government spending and an unsustainable housing boom caused by the mismanagement of the previous Government. Those people will get jobs only when this Government’s programme of building the confidence of businesses to invest and employ makes more progress.
Are the long queues for jobs we are seeing around New Zealand, and the latest unemployment figures, which the Minister described as a “shock” to her, the reason she admitted, last week, that “aggressive” is not the word she would use to describe the so-called recovery, which put her at odds with the Prime Minister and the Minister of Finance?
The recovery has been quite considerable. As was pointed out to the House yesterday, the economy turned round from a 1.5 to 2 percent shrinkage; it is now on a path to 2 to 2.5 percent growth, which is generating a consistent rise in hours worked and a drop in unemployment. That is not as fast as we would like, but the lesson we have learnt from that—
Yes, unemployment has dropped, from its peak. The lesson we have learnt is that jobs based on the kind of growth that the previous Government promoted, which was funded by excessive borrowing, and not by growth in the tradable and export sector, were jobs that were unsustainable.
Katrina ShanksIn fact, yes, the Minister has received feedback from employers who have made it clear that the staff they have recently taken on under the trial period would not have got jobs if it were not for the opportunity for those young people to get their foot in the door, show that they can prove their worth, and, for instance, thereby earn the opportunity for an apprenticeship.
When she said there had been a 40 percent rise in online job adverts and that she could see the employment situation improving, had she seen the report by the TV3 reporter Patrick Gower that stated some of those jobs were duplicates; if so, what is the real number of jobs available?
There are any number of ways to measure changes in employment, ranging from job ads in a newspaper to the online job ads, to the various surveys carried out by Statistics New Zealand. One thing is quite clear: unemployment has peaked, and employment is growing. We wish the employment rate would grow faster, but we do not have the choice of just cranking up the recovery. The Government is already putting about $9 billion of cash into the economy, supporting thousands of jobs through job schemes, through its extensive infrastructure investment. In the long run, more jobs are about building the confidence of businesses to invest and employ. We are working relentlessly on that.
Having said that she backs unemployed people all the way and constantly promotes her job schemes, is she aware that these programmes are hardly making a dent in the youth unemployment rate, which is up 65 percent since June 2008 to a disgraceful total of 68,200; I do not think the Minister could say that unemployment has obviously peaked?
The Minister does promote the job schemes vigorously because they are providing the opportunity for about 9,000 young people to keep contact with the workforce. The fact is that the new jobs that are created are created not because the Government is spending up large or because households are borrowing a whole lot of money, but because it needs to rebalance the economy, grow the tradables and exporting part of this economy, and create sustainable jobs through business investment and employment.