National's job claims vs reality
Even though the Household Labour Force Survey report reveals that John Key’s ‘brighter future’ promise has utterly failed to materialise in terms of jobs for a growing group of New Zealanders, it hasn’t stopped Mr Key claiming it won’t still come true. Yet we know he has no overall plan, no vision for how this will happen. Last year he made the incredible claim that Budget 2011 would create 170,000 jobs over the next 5 years. He continued to make this claim despite not being able to show anything in the Budget that would actually lead to job creation other than low interest rates and ECE funding. Simply managing the economy and ticking off boxes and hoping that market forces will deliver on the jobs is unbelievable. As expected the Govt is on track to once again fall short of its promise. The 2011 Budget documents predicted 36,000 jobs would be created in the year to March 2012. As at Dec 2011 just 10,000 jobs have been created, leaving the Govt to create a massive 26,000 jobs in the final quarter. If JohnKey keeps promising New Zealanders the world but not delivering, his credibility will be on the line, and we all know the story of the boy who cried wolf, don’t we?
They do have a plan, its called the christchurch re-build.
@Sua – 3 more years!
National and John Key need to be accountable for these false calculations you can’t keep blaming the GFC and the Canterbury Earthquake.
John Key has not made the tough decisions as he does not want to damage his popularity with his core voters.
We are selling assets to pay for tax cuts fot the rich.
Bill English is trying to scare us now just like Roger Douglas did 20 years ago.
35 years of incompetent Government driving NZ into a brickwall.
Why is NZ with all it’s natural resources and food production such a basket case.
Asset sales don’t work, all they do is give incompetent Government’s some oxygen to keep going, Let the currency crash anf get our export sector going again. We have an inflated $ which is hurting our Balance of Payments.
Asset sales are the only rabbit Key and English have to pull out of the hat, we are heading the way of the PIGS.
Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain.
How many new workers do we have entering the market every year? How many workers exit every year? It would be good to know how many jobs need to be created just to maintain current employment levels (which are not high enough). Does the in excess of 1 billion of savings lost due to the finance company collapses mean that more people have had to stay in the workforce than normal?
The bailout of South Canterbury Finance is another reason why we have to sell assets to pay for another Treasury cock up.
@ beachbum According the Salvation Army’s State of the Nation report – The Growing Divide, NZ’s participation rate in the labour market between 2006-2011 fell slightly from 68.3% to 68.2% to a working age population of nearly 3.5 million people, and the 0.1% drop in participation rate means there are 35,000 fewer people in the labour market. The overall effect of this expanding workforce was a rise of unemployment from an official rate of 3.8% in December 2006 to 6.3% in December 2011. If NZ is to return to the same level of unemployment in Dec 2006 before the global recession, there will need to be a further 90,000 jobs created in addition to the extra 25,000-30,000 jobs required each year just to keep up with labour force growth.
@Sua, thanks for the update. We certainly have some large challenges creating 25,000 to 30,000 jobs in the current environment.
Surely then Job Creation should be a key driver to government policy??? If National could show that asset sales will create jobs then that would be one tick….
I would imagine asset sales will lead to further job losses as hungry investors demand more returns
Is everyone saying that the Job Summit of 2009, proclaimed as a “do-fest not a talk-fest” didn’t work????
Did I understand Mr English recently to say that the revenue from asset sales would be less than dividend returns over (ten?) years?
Mr key was quite clear prior tot he election that partial sales would be used to make our education world class and improve our health system. IF that is no longer possible do they have a mandate? How can they know if their voters voted just for partial sale, or for partial sale provided it went to health and education?