Upston Louise: General DebateText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeUpston Louise: General Debate[Sitting date: 06 May 2015. Volume:705;Page:3251. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon LOUISE UPSTON (Associate Minister for Tertiary Education Skills and Employment):I move That the House take note of miscellaneous business. I am a proud New Zealander and I am proud to be part of a Government that is leading a courageous country and a growing economy. I am also incredibly proud to follow the speakers on this side of the House who are out there actually making a difference for hard-working New Zealanders in all sorts of circumstances from one end of the country to the other. We have a Prime Minister who is willing to be courageous and to lead programmes that might be different from the programmes we have seen from previous Governments—programmes that are not delivering for New Zealand. This side of the House is doing things that we believe in trusting Māori to look at solutions that work for them in their communities that they are leading.I want to turn my attention to across the Ditch. I want to talk as Associate Minister for Tertiary Education Skills and Employment about my experience at one of our campaign-promised job fairs that was in Melbourne. The very intent of these job fairs is to attract our Kiwis home. There are 480000 of them living in Australia. It was quite amazing to be part of a conversation with a Māori woman who was in tears. She wants to come home. She can see the opportunities here in New Zealand which are so far greater than what is on offer in Australia. It was really quite moving to realise that we have Kiwis whom we are attracting home to New Zealand.To be fair we are also offering that opportunity to Aussies who want to become Kiwis. It is interesting that the net migration from Australia to the year February 2015 was 2400. That is the highest level ever since records began in 1978. I think that says pretty clearly how well Prime Minister John Key is leading this country and our economic recovery. Those are the sorts of things they look at. It was really interesting. It was about the day that the Kiwi dollar was hitting parity with the Australian dollar. It was amazing to get the sense from those Australians that we are no longer regarded as the poor cousin. We are up there right alongside them and actually we are overtaking them. If you look at our economic performance and if you look at our unemployment rate at 5.8 percent as compared with their 6.2 percent we are heading down and they are heading up. No longer is Australia the Lucky Country. We have a golden opportunity in terms of attracting Kiwis home.I guess one of the challenges when you have a growing economy an economy growing as strongly as it is is that there are a few growing pains. One of those is being able to fill jobs in industries that we clearly need. These job fairs were very directly focused on filling jobs in information and communications technology manufacturing health construction trades engineering and transport. There are 4500 job seekers directly looking at coming here. It was a fantastic opportunity.As the previous speaker Minister Parata said we are also training young New Zealanders Māori and Pasifika students female and male at a greater rate than the previous Government and probably those students from the past whom the Opposition in its days in Government left behind. We are actually turning round the results and the lives and the futures of those very New Zealanders. That is why I get reactions from tradies in my electorate like the one I spoke to yesterday who said “Can you give John a message for me? Tell him he’s doing a bloody good job and we want to keep him longer.” That is the mood that I get whether I am talking to groups in Dunedin or whether I am talking to groups in Northland. Hard-working middle New Zealand from one end of the country to the other knows that John Key our Prime Minister is delivering for them—delivering in the areas that count.I want to talk specifically about women’s participation in the workforce because this is one of my priorities: making sure that the skills and utilisation of women is fully realised. This is a Government that is backing New Zealand women to succeed. I am really pleased to say that the results that came out today in the household labour force survey show that there are 3000 fewer women unemployed in the March 2015 quarter. There are some very specific things that we are doing to engage more women in employment. Canterbury is a classic example: there is a shortage in the construction sector. The Ministry for Women has done a very practical collaborative job with the sector to get more women into jobs.