While Audrey Young was giving the Key cabinet a glowing report card yesterday as they lurch from crisis to crisis (so many crises the Novopay scandal can’t make the front pages after 3 months of stuff ups), the economy continued to struggle.
With the crises in housing and unemployment, there are worrying trends of increasing marginalisation and struggle for selected demographic groups, such as women, Maori and Pasifika people. Meanwhile, there has been a recent increase in male unemployment. This probably is because there are fewer secure, well-paid, full time jobs available.
The last time unemployment was this high, Bill English was Finance Minister and his government was facing electoral oblivion. I don’t remember his excuses last time but this time he’s taken a different excuse from Key and Joyce. English calls this ‘grumpy growth’. Of course, it’s not growth, it’s the exact opposite. If this is ‘grumpy growth’, I suppose Hurricane Sandy was ‘grumpy sunshine’.
Remember when Key’s excuse for rising unemployment was that it was a “lagging indicator” and the numbers would soon fall? Well, that was 3 years ago and its been lagging a hell of a long time because, since then 25,000 more Kiwis have become unemployed. So, what was the excuse yesterday with the shocking unemployment numbers?
Yesterday, 60 highly paid jobs at Rakon where lost and we learned 5,700 manufacturing jobs had been lost in the past year. The reason, the high dollar made manufacturing here untenable. Steve Joyce shrugged his shoulders like it was nothing to do with him. But it’s his government’s failures that are forcing Kiwi manufacturers overseas.
Yet National’s position is that there isn’t a problem, let alone that they can do anything about it.
A TV3 poll shows that 49% to 46% of people believe National is failing to build its promised “brighter future”. The two big weaknesses: jobs and education. By nearly 2 to 1 margins, people believe that National is failing to provide full employment (it says something that this isn’t actually a National Party goal) and failing to provide the best education system possible.
Labour Day celebrates, what was at the time, a cutting edge victory for working people – the 8 hour working day. But the struggles continue for men and women. Now is not the time to be going backwards on issues that impact on workers, people struggling on low incomes, or beneficiaries. Updated.
A great piece by Byran Gould yesterday on National’s refusal to acknowledge the jobs crisis in manufacturing, even as the ANZ says unemployment is on its way up to 7%. National is really on the wrong side of public perception and the wrong side of history here. They look like ostriches trying to deny the problem, while the Left is presenting the solutions.
This afternoon David Shearer gave a speech about jobs at the Hornby Workingman’s Club. It’s exactly the kind of speech I want to hear from the Labour leader, with plenty of substance to add weight to rhetoric.
Here’s Granny Herald’s genius plan for economic development: if Meridian can get more money for its power elsewhere, it should let Tiwai Point close. 3,000 jobs would be lost. Invercargill and Bluff would effectively be killed. But, hey, market forces! Problem is, if Meridian only considers its narrow commercial interests, it ignores the cost to the country as a whole.
There is ample evidence of a deep and lasting crisis, but in the delusional world of Planet Key it doesn’t exist. The EPMU Job Crisis Summit opened a much needed conversation. Russel Norman likened the New Zealand economy to a rudderless sailing ship In Stormy Seas. Will the summit be the start of a sea change for NZ?
Today leaders of 3 opposition parties took part in an historic press conference. Winston Peters, David Shearer and Russel Norman jointly announced the launch of a parliamentary inquiry into the crisis in manufacturing. Update: Links to articles added. One News Video.
Why is John Key backing the flagging tourist industry as a major export earner for NZ’s future? His trip to Hollywood was partly about using the Hobbit to promote NZ as a tourist destination. Why is the government so fixated on attracting more US tourists?
If I was at the manufacturing crisis summit this Friday, and if John Key was showing up rather than spending his time on Planet Key and claiming that manufacturing is doing “extremely well”, I would ask him this: How come when Hollywood calls, you drop everything and go; how come you arrest Dotcom for them and give them $50m a year; but when Kiwi jobs are bieng lost, all you have to offer is denials and the cold shoulder?
National promised us an “unrelenting focus on jobs” and delivered record highs in unemployment and emigration. Now Key is refusing to even attend a Union jobs summit, because on Planet Key everything is just fine. The unwillingness to admit that anything is wrong is just blind arrogance.
In another slippery John Key u-turn, after his mission to Hollywood ‘sweeteners’ are now on the table. Key is bending over to let US-based conglomerates extend their dominance in NZ, in support of their own interests and values.
I turned on the news hoping to see the Nats’ rebuttal of the Greens’ detailed plan to protect Kiwi manufacturing like our competitors are doing. Instead, I saw a smirking fuck who has overseen the loss of 40,000 manufacturing jobs say ‘the high dollar’s good’. Joyce actually says a over-valued dollar is a good thing. ‘Flat-screen tellies are cheaper! Pity you don’t have a job to buy one!’
40,000 manufacturing jobs gone in four years. Manufactured exports in free-fall. Tourism revenue collapsing. If that’s not a crisis, what is? Why is […]
40 jobs in a hi-tech business repairing jet engines are set to be lost. The business’s profits are being slaughtered by the high dollar. The Bluff smelter could close – 900 jobs directly on the line, plus thousands more in the local economy – as Rio Tinto can’t make a profit with the dollar so high and aluminum prices down. How much longer will we do nothing?
Today there have been protests around NZ, against Paula Bennett’s punitive welfare reforms.
Updates: Include ODT article link and extract, photos of Henderson protest, and links to several news articles.
As Key heads off to the US to promote the NZ film industry, I look back at the Hobbit union-busting case and the issues it raised. Will Key’s latest mission to Hollywood, boost the economy, increase jobs and provide benefits to the NZ film industry? Or will it actually undermine the NZ’s economy and democracy, further Americanising NZ’s culture along with it?
We’re told 36,000 workers are needed for the Christchurch rebuild. But since the earthquakes began 2 years ago, 9,000 people with the skills needed for the rebuild have left New Zealand. We’re making no effort to keep the skilled workers we have but the Government thinks those 36,000 workers will just magically appear when needed.
David Cunliffe has given another excellent economic development speech. I think what’s interesting is that he’s not really proposing new policy – what he’s saying is largely in line with the platform Labour ran in on 2011, but he’s articulating the vision behind those policies – the why, rather than just the how – which was lacking from Labour in 2011. Great stuff.
Welcome to National’s economy: Kiwirail has just announced 158 infrastructure and engineering job losses, and this afternoon Solid Energy will probably announce the loss of 300 jobs at Spring Creek, and 200-250 elsewhere. This on top of the swathe of job losses in Huntly and Christchurch Solid Energy announced a month ago.
The ever forward looking and even-handed Herald devotes its editorial to attacking Labour for supporting Winston Peters’ Bill to make some small changes to the Reserve Banks’ objectives to bring them more in line with Australia’s. Leaving aside the fact that the Herald hasn’t attacked NZF or the 3 other parties who support this, only Labour, isn’t it time Granny got with the programme?
National is celebrating the creation of 1300 jobs (only 300 permanent) with a prison. How many more prisons would they have to build to reverse the increase in unemployment under their watch and create 65,000 permanent jobs? Only 217. It’s ironic that the only job creation the free-market loving Nats can trumpet is a government-paid for prison.
Over the last week, the government’s off-world set of distorted realities has come to the foreground: those of “Planet John Key” and “Planet Paula”. These worlds highlight the way Bennett’s latest welfare reforms wage war on the poor and undermine fairness and democracy.
I saw this story on Friday saying about how the number of jobs available on seek.co.nz is up. Paula Bennett and John Key regularly come up with stories about how many jobs there are out there – you only need to look at trademe or seek – but they don’t mention that…
The paper mill at Kawerau is halving its production, and its workforce. Another hundred plus jobs gone. Meanwhile, Norske Skog, which owns the mill, is expanding production at its paper mill in Tasmania. What’s the difference? In Australia, the government is investing in local production and local jobs to substitute imports. Here, our government doesn’t give a fuck.
Steven Joyce is meant to be the Jobs Czar. So, what’s his reaction to another hundred job losses yesterday at the Bluff smelter and the threat of the loss of 3,200 more? “If [Tiwai Pt closed], it would adjust different things like investment profiles and all sorts of things” but no worries because Rio Tinto and Meridian will “come to some arrangement”.
I’m no fan of coal mining, obviously. We need to reduce the amount of carbon we put in the atmosphere dramatically and stopping digging it up would be a good start. But the Nats have no such concerns. They want more jobs in hydrocarbon extraction. So, why the lack of any kind of response from National to stop job losses at Spring Creek?
National has a line on child poverty to allow them to oppose actually doing anything: ‘Jobs! Jobs are the solution to poverty, not more assistance for poor kids. National is about jobs, not handouts! And we’ll get more jobs with mining!’ But their record doesn’t match the rhetoric … There are 65,000 more unemployed under National and hundreds of mining jobs are being lost.
Remember the Ports of Auckland lock-out? The bosses tried to starve out 300 worker to push through contracting out, and ‘save’ $6m a year. The workers won. Now, PoAL has reported a $12m loss caused by the $33m cost of the lockout. So, the bosses spent $33m trying to get a $6m a year ‘saving’. Time the councils sacks the managers who wasted that money.
David Shearer is right. The rise in inequality under National, shown by the latest Household Incomes report from MSD, is a bloody disgrace. Good on Shearer for his robust and instinctive response. Now we look forward to seeing it reflected in the outcomes from the policy work that is going on behind the scenes.
