At midday today we released our youth employment policy. There was a reason we chose to do it at a plumbing and gas outfit in the Hutt- our policy focuses heavily on apprenticeships. But that is by no means all it does.
You would have heard us pretty consistently challenging the government over youth unemployment on several fronts. First, the need to create sustainable jobs rather than throwing money at make work schemes, second we need more vocational training places (the government has cut $140mill out of this area) and third, the scale of the problem means we need a pretty comprehensive set of ideas to deal with it. That’s exactly what we announced today. Here’s the summary version:
- 1000 placements for at risk youth in the Gateway scheme, which puts young people into work place learning while they’re still at school
-Improving career services and vocational pathways, especially for young people interested in options outside of tertiary study
- Extending youth transition services to make sure that every school leaver is supported into further training, education and employment. This follows the recommendations of the New Zealand Institute and the Mayors Taskforce for Jobs
- Converting dole payments into a subsidy for employers to take on 9000 new apprentices
- 5000 new training places for 16 and 17 year olds, 1,000 of which are targeted at maori trades training, and 1,000 for pasifika young people, with a mentoring component attached (both groups are over represented in our youth unemployment statistics)
- 1,000 additional apprenticeships allocated to group apprenticeships, shared apprenticeships and public service cadets
- An additional 1,500 Conservation Corp places
- Staged apprenticeships in Christchurch, so that apprentices can get basic skills quickly and play a productive role in the rebuild without having to bring in workers from overseas
The whole package comes in at $251 million, but after factoring in the money that is saved through reprioritisation of current government spending, and the savings via the dole, the total cost comes in at $171million and will be funded by our already announced tax plan. Ultimately though, this is a package that has us investing a bit, to save a lot. The New Zealand institute has calculated that the cost of unemployed and disengaged youth to tax payers in $900million.
And finally, job creation. We already know that the demand for skilled trades people exists, but employers just can’t afford to train new people in the job- our dole subsidy scheme will help with that. More broadly though, we also know that our economic policy (supporting exporters, our R&D tax credit, and moving investment to the productive economy) will all play a role in creating sustainable jobs.
There is more to be said on employment beyond young people, but this is a critical area, and one we’re Labour is showing we’re willing to invest in order to save….in so many ways.
Given your vaunted tax plan will not return any increase in taxation for 7 years, how due you propose funding this in the meantime?
Yee haa! This is great!
!
Skills, good, apprenticeships, good, jobs, good!
!
#ownourfuture
Jacinda, please point out where it’s already funded in the tax plan.
It looks very much like the plan announced in 2000, 2001, 2002, and 2003. Every year it was announced, it would take three years to accomplish. Your government didn’t accomplish it last time. What makes you think voters will believe that you will manage it next time?
@Pumpkin – Details, mere details….something else for the expert panel to look at
{deleted, off topic trolling. This is a final warning, do it again and you will be banned, Grant}
Considered requiring those who leave school to have a job, education, training or work experience training lined up to do so? Then those 16 and 17 year olds who leave now and do nothing would not be left alone with no income or no progress being made.
Thus those without paid work would be available to do unpaid work via work training placements until age 18 – where part-time in conjunction with school courses in related subjects and general life skills including remedial education as required. Expanding existing programmes markedly to cater to this wider group of pupils staying in school.
The compulsion lowers cost – apart from costs for extra retained pupils, if only part-time.
For those over 18, why not a half wage where there is training by the employer (this is still more than the dole and thus the training and work experience is free). Again the employer meets the training cost and the wage cost and so the cost to the taxpayer is neglible.
Many will prefer this to study and student debt and still with no entry to a job guaranteed, and this deepens the range of opportunities for young people (and also older people who choose this option).
Very encouraging!
Labour: Offering positive investment in the future of our country by helping the vulnerable through positive initiatives.
National: Determined to isolate and punish the vulnerable to win votes using a benefit card scheme, disgusting.
Never mind about how it will be paid for!
I suggest wealth and extravagence taxes. Or reversing the corporate benefits given to bailed out SCF bond holders.
Remember, we are all paying a very high price for wasting the true treasure: the youth of NZ wasted on the unemployment scrap heap, as you quibble over “money”.
Hell, just scrap a few miles of Joyces Holiday Highway and you got your money.
Its all about priorities and National’s priorities are trucking and roading firms.
CV Jacinda says it was provided for in the alternative budget. I would like to see where it’s included in the budget.
How many kids in NZ are in the Gateway programme at the moment?
What’s Labour’s policy on Trades Academies? Surely supporting trades training in schools would be important to achieving a brighter future?
if Labour hadn’t closed the Railway Workshops and Depots up and down the country, there would be at least 20,000 more jobs available. The Railways put many 1,000′s of youth through apprenticships. Many of them went on into the private section creating openings for a new intake.
The extra benefit is that we would be making our own rolling stock and our tracks would be in better nick.
Oh well, too late now .. or is it?
What is so wrong with some overseas workers?
There are heaps of skilled unemployed Irish and Americans from the housing bubbles that crashed over there. Why not allow some to work here on condition that they take an apprentice to train.
Wouldn’t this be a win/win, i.e. more apprentices trained, and work completed in Chch faster?
The latest reports in the paper suggested people will be waiting 15 years.
The moral bankruptcy of the right’s drone bloggers here is so repetitive and negative. Surely it makes sense to train our young to help rebuild Christchurch? Say it loud Mr Goff. Employ young kiwis, do not import Irish workers, and I have nothing whatsoever against immigrant workers, to do what we can and should be doing. Simplistic messages are fine if there is a collective spirit and purpose involved. Shonkey’s (the Hollow Mens) take on simplistic amounts to dumbed down and obfuscation, Labours should be clear and straight.
Where is Labour’s policy people have asked? Well here is some more!
Restore youth rates so young people will again be employed in after school and holiday jobs thereby gaining work experience. They will also gain the ethics that regular work entails.
CV – you conveniently overlook that the SCF and other finance company bail outs was/are the direct result of a Michael Cullen initiative.
Watch the Tories scramble. Tax and spend. Big government. Social engineering. Nanny state. Where’s the money coming from? You had nine years. You promised this before. Goff can’t win. Have I missed any?
Have I missed any?
Where’s the evidence?
True Wheel. You are joking surely! I am all for innovative programs for young people (and I have yet to make up my mind on this one), but there is no way that a new intake of young people could be identified and trained in time to help with the rebuild. That issue is with us now.
Colonial Viper you clearly don’t live north of Auckland. There needs to be a motorway quality road all the way to Whangarei at least. Northland is an area of great scenic beauty, and also the highest unemployment rate in the country. Joyce’s Holiday Highway as you trivialize it should be the beginning of such a link. This would create more jobs, and make it easier for tourists to access the north. Roading is an investment and as such it has a return. In my view NZ should have a quality highway from north to south.
Michael Cullen didn’t approve SCF’s re-inclusion in the scheme multiple times, when SCF did not meet the criteria.
Bill English did.
You conveniently overlooked that.
Oh, one more thing. English should have determined that all bond holders would take a 50% haircut on every dollar over $250,000 that they had invested. That would have protected ma and pa savers…but the big time speculators should and would have got burnt.
That would have saved NZ hundreds of millions…just enough for Labour’s programme actually haha
Great policy Jacinta. National have no policy and no ideas beyond punish and coerce and handing out $12 million to private enterprise.
Pretty words, but Joyce’s holiday highway is a waste of time, it barely breaks even and when petrol goes to $3/L in a years time it will start making a huge loss.
If you want to help the people of Northland invest $500M in community projects, public transport and local businesses, not in bitumen designed to help property speculators get rich.
Finally some positive proactiveness…and costed even.
Surely we all agree we need ALL employable people actively in training or in work and not on the dole or under utilised.
More people employed at real wage levels, upskilled at every stage, being managed better and more productive with more innovative and creative ideas – thats how you build a successful economy.
Ive give some of my hard earned salary gladly when i know it is being used for the betterment of us all and not the few.
Time for us kiwi’s to be heard – vote for a party that values all kiwi’s, businesses and the worker too. Not this extreme right focus on creating a ‘big money’ dominated world where people are just seen as a commodity to be used up cheaply to create a special ‘winter wonderland’ for the rich and powerfully connected.
@Jacinda what extra rights will employers have for taking on low skill untested youth? Will incentives cover risks & will 90 day law stay?
Darrenw – we have had youth as potenial workers for a while now ( i think jesus was an apprentice builder at one stage but hard to say as he transited between a few jobs i.e fisherman, winemaker, seller of medicine etc. )
Why do employers in this free market economy system need a handout from the govt at all…surely with good management practices and understanding an untested youth can become a longterm productive employee valued and rewarded…remember the youth of today will be the backbone of production tommorrow.
I personally have employed a range of people, all ages etc and with good structure and management techniques cant complain much about youth so perhap look to own skill levels before begging the govt for a handout or other incentive.
@geoffcartwright I too have employed a number of youth who have been fantastic – but it is a bigger risk and with the demise of youth rates the incentive to take a punt on a young person is gone. The handouts seem to favor those least willing to take a risk rather than those providing jobs. It seems as usual Labour want to have employers carry the can without any willingness to incentivise those willing to put substantial investment into the workers of tomorrow. Without incentives for employers the youth unemployment rate won’t drop.
It would be a promising policy, and very attractive.
BUT – why should we believe you this time when the same policy was introduced by the 9-year Labour govt. at least twice with no discernible result? Especially when the party is made up of pretty much the same people who made and broke promises so readily during the last government?
Colonial Viper – Excellent another prediction from a peak oiler. In the future we’ll be able to file it away with all the other failed predictions of peak oilers.
Do you want to bet on whether petrol prices will be $3 or more per liter this time next year?
@anne and jennifer – keep calling them out on the memes
@people calling for a youth rate – if this transparent double-act of Don “Stalking Horse” Brash calling for the abolition of the minimum wage, and Smile and “I’m so moderate” Cut succeeds in their con, you might get what you’re after. But New Zealand will be a less equal, harder place to survive for it. “Underclass”, much?
Sure. $3/L petrol within the next 365 days. Price in any of the 5 major urban centres. Lets put a $20 donation to the NZ Red Cross on it
To be crystal clear, peak conventional oil was 2005 or 2006. We are living on the very slight downslope of the other side of the plateau right now.
The slope gets steeper soon.
Sure we are. Cue some absurd apocalyptic prediction that peak oilers have been making for decades and have yet to eventuate.
To make the bet more interesting how about you choose some socialist organisation, for the money to go towards in the event that you win, and I’ll choose some free market, liberal, libertarian, anti-statist, or anarchist organisation,(something that will really offend your sensibilities) in the event that I win?
Don’t be an ass. The Club of Rome report in 1972 published by MIT is very clear, as have been the recent updates to that report.
The fact that you only have a field of vision which extends to your own generation should not give you the power to inflict your own short sighted stupidity on others or on my grandchildren.
That is the dumbest and most illogical thing I’ve read today. Akin to – the grenade whose pin I’ve pulled and stuffed into my pants hasn’t gone off yet so everything must be fine. Good luck with that.
Word to the wise: there will be no net growth per capita in OECD countries over the next decade, because the cheap energy required for true economic growth is gone.
Try and hit an emotional age higher than 12, OK?
3 News did a good story on this policy:
http://www.3news.co.nz/Labours-plan-to-shake-up-youth-unemployment/tabid/370/articleID/224301/Default.aspx
The difference between this initiative and the previous ones is that this one works directly with employers, rather than trying to compete with them. By subsidising wages it cancels out some of the effect of high minimum wages.
Good on Labour for finally realising that employers are the solution to unemployment!
My biggest complaint is that it doesn’t go far enough. We need to help people get on-the-job experience, even if that job doesn’t have a formal NZQA-approved assessed apprenticeship. Scrap minimum wages and get the government to subsidise low incomes instead.
I believe Joyce right on TV tonight, an adaptation of Nat policy already in place??? Come on Labs. As a Mum trying to return to work, applying for hundreds of jobs having no interviews so far, having been in skilled technical work for 20years prior to kids and now ABLE to return, this sort of policy does people like me in the eye ! Not being in the workforce for 12 years I cannot go back at the level I was (intermediate) and applying for junior positions at 50 years old isn’t getting me the job either. I am a single parent, have a mortgage, rates extortionate (in EQ area) and now house insurance is to increase 61% I’m told and I have to do this on a benefit income. The Nats took away training incentive allowance so on the job training the only way but No even the Labs have fallen for the Nat philosophy now it seems and give the young a leg up and prefer to forget about the returning Mums who have bought up good kids and ran a good home on a shoe string for a number of years so what the hope for us 50 year olds now? There’s only so many warehouse jobs, where does my specialist technical training take me now with the kids getting employer preference? Kids at the expense of the mature worker great LABS !
@darrenw – hi there.
“Without incentives for employers the youth unemployment rate won’t drop”
1) if an employer needs to go to the labour market to find an semi / un skilled entry level worker i.e youth because of various reasons then they will period. The fit for a particulr job is still there.
2) dont we as a society and community give enough to businesses already. e.g tax breaks and lower tax rates.
3)so then you are in favour of a larger tax rake and govt to pay for all these social schemes such as your mentioned incentives to employee for youth hires. while it does have it merits isnt this just another way for businesses to generate or save some cash?
@ Anne, I missed the obvious one, ‘you started it’.
Yes, it is dumb and illogical, but that is the reality of the peak oil crowd and why you should be skeptical and take what they say with a grain of salt. Take some of the following predictions of peak oiler Mike Ruppert:
In 08′
In 09′
Or the following from Matthew Simmons the late doyen of the peak oil movement:
On the gulf oil spill
and
Really I think you should look at the peak oil movement with a critical eye.
Now you’ve made a prediction on the price of oil in a year’s time and I am willing to bet you that it will not be the case and now in true peak oil style you have made another extreme prediction
I’m willing to take you up on that too.
This is good policy at last from Labour. If you get the opportunity Jacinda, I hope labour will implement it within the 1st term.
Good initiative.
I wonder if the ‘year one’ subsidy could be extended to cover the minimum wage discussion as well, incentivising employers to hire more staff at a living wage.
In about 15 years time
Great work, taking what is currently paid for little to no return, and using it to get kids a working future. Shows up the kind of thinking that went into the benefit card alright, the current govt. completely lacks the conveniently undefined ‘fresh idead’ JK kept promising last election. Good luck for November!
Gee Pumpkin, I thought you’d be pleased to see MPs posting after your complaints they don’t post enough. How about a run through of all the campaign 2008 promises from National and how the implementation has gone…
I’ll start
Close the gaps (wages with Australia)
No tax increases
Then we can move on to the 420m to SCF Foreign investors who WERE NOT COVERED BY THE SCHEME). and which scheme B English chose to renew despite warning from treaury…
Remember the Job Summit which was going to be a “Do fest not a talk-fest”
Or the rushed through under urgency 90 day trial which would ONLY be offered to smaller companies…
We need to be careful here. Give employers money to engage particular staff – and then don’t be surprised if the unemployment bubble moves to a group that may be slightly older! Other unemployed people will find it all the harder to find work.
This IS a make-work scheme although it has greater pretensions than others of the past.
Never forget one definition – unemployment exists where there is not enough work to be accomplished. Is this not another case where we are trying to fudge a basic reality?
And what about the rorts that such a scheme will encourage?
Why subsidise the work training places at all, make it unpaid for those under 18 and for those over 18 simply allow the employer to offer trainee wages (say half the $15 an hour minimum wage proposed) for the duration of the training. This costs nothing for unlimited places.
Unlikely to work, SPC.
For under 18, no pay = no incentive to work.
Also, trainee wages would need to be at least above the dole + allowances with a contractual understanding from the employer to continue employment at market rates post training.
More effective to incentivise the employer directly.
That is easy, only those in work, training or education can leave school at age 16. Others have to remain in school doing NCEA, or use various programmes like Gateway that involve doing work placements, either work experience while doing vocational training at school or training on the job.
Half $15 an hour (Labour’s minimum wage) is $300 a week before tax (first $5000 tax free and then a low rate tax) – this is way more than the under 25 dole about $170 a week and the over 25 dole of about $200 a week. Those in work can also claim accommodation supplement. The training wage would only apply for the duration of the training period agree by an initial contract.
You say it would “more effective to incentivise the employer directly.”
How, this way the employer gets a real incentive to take on 16 and 17 year olds, the only cost is the supervision and training. This means the goal of all under 18 being in school, education/training or employment can finally be realised.
As for those over 18, this method means the number of training wage places is unlimited as there is no cost on the taxpayer.