Stewart Barbara: Social Security (Youth Support and Work Focus) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Stewart Barbara: Social Security (Youth Support and Work Focus) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Advance Copy - Subject to minor change before inclusion in Bound Volume.] 
BARBARA STEWART (NZ First) 
: 
 On behalf of New Zealand First and Asenati Lole-Taylor I rise to speak to the Social Security (Youth Support and Work Focus) Amendment Bill. We have heard this afternoon from the Government speakers that the purpose of this bill is to transform the benefit system into one that is modern active and work focused. That sounds really well and good. We could agree with that if the economy was moving along. It would be perfectly acceptable but in New Zealand First we have one question. Where are the jobs? The biggest incentive of all for training is a job. That is what people want. Unfortunately the brighter future that we have all been promised has not eventuated. We need far more than the hope and aspiration that the previous speaker Tim Macindoe was talking about. We do want the best for our young people and our people but we want jobs—real jobs—out there. 
 As the YouTube video states—there is a YouTube clip—“We don’t want your ghost jobs John. We want real jobs.” As a result many of our young people are heading across the Tasman because they want to work. They see a brighter future over in Australia not here in New Zealand. Since National came to power in 2008 unemployment has absolutely soared. The National Employment Indicator published by Statistics New Zealand suggests that there are almost 40000 fewer jobs since December 2008. This has been in spite of the vaunted Job Summit and Mr Key’s bold prediction of 171000 new jobs. 
Even Treasury does not agree with these figures. They have provided a job forecast of 1.6 percent per annum over the next 3 years. We do not know whether these are full-time jobs or part-time jobs. We know that many people are not counted in the job seeker statistics because they are married they are working part-time and we have got a whole group of young people who are moving from one short-term job to another. They want to work full-time but they cannot; there are no full-time jobs. We want them to have career jobs but does this legislation look as if it is going to promise that? Unfortunately no. The Government basically sold its voters the belief that the economic forecast was based on a whole lot of optimism around jobs but the reality is that there is not. It is such a shame. 
The cycleway alone—and I know a lot of people hung their hats on that cycleway—was supposed to create 4000 jobs at least. In fact it created 70 and they were just very localised. I know that in my community five people were employed for a very short period of time. That is only five—far short of the 4000. What did we have? We had a bobcat driver we had a concrete truck driver and his assistant—so there is three—and we had two women to direct the traffic one at each end saying “Stop” and “Go”. It was definitely not a career-type opportunity for a young person. It is not enough to keep them here in New Zealand for a long period of time; it is only another short-term job. In New Zealand First we believe that the benefit system should actively help and promote paid work and independence but have we really overlooked the barriers to finding real full-time work? I think that this legislation has. 
There need to be full-time jobs. The concept of a Government passing legislation to declare that beneficiaries should be work-ready is just totally ludicrous. It is offensive to those who are genuinely trying hard to find themselves full-time work. It is a hard economic time but there are a lot of people out there looking but there is nothing to look for. There is no lack of will to work. New Zealanders have always been keen to work but there is simply not enough work available for men and women of all age groups. Young people especially are affected. The number of 15 to 24-year-olds out of work and training is enough to fill Ericsson Stadium to full capacity and still not have enough room for them all. Trying to shame them into work like this bill is doing just is not the answer. The jobs are not available. Employers are extremely choosy and the bottom line is that they are not willing to try people out if they have not got the right experience the right qualifications or even if they do not know the right people and that is the crux of the matter. 
It also means that employers are taking advantage of our young people—particularly young employees—so I am waiting to see Minister Wilkinson’s bill come back into the House because the scarcity of jobs means that employers are tough. I know of one multinational employer right in my home town who will not allow their employees to have annual leave who will not let them have work breaks and who lets them work unreasonable hours. It is just ludicrous. These young people work all of those hours because they want a job. A poor job like that is far better than no job. 
If the Government is really serious about addressing unemployment then it needs to propose a whole new way forward. New Zealand First said that it would support good legislation and we intend on being very true to our word but this is not good legislation. It would be better suited to Victorian England than 21st century New Zealand. Although there are a few measures in this bill that might go a small way to addressing some of the problems the Minister highlighted it fails to address the root causes of welfare dependency. Our welfare system is not so much an ambulance at the bottom of the cliff at this point in time it is more of a case of kicking somebody when they are down. 
We all agree that the benefit system should actively help and promote paid work and independence but we do need jobs. The Government believed that jobs would be available and it is now predicting only job losses. So we can only infer that this bill is based on extreme optimism which is far different from reality. 
Finally New Zealand First has got some very serious reservations about this increase in the use of the private sector in finding jobs. The goal is to pay private companies or organisations for every person they get off welfare. It sounds really good in principle but we want to know what audits or safeguards are in place to ensure that these private providers actually assist young people into employment. We know about the case of A4e in the UK and that should serve as a warning to the Government. If these sorts of schemes have resulted in systemic fraud abroad we should be very wary about adopting them here. 
The other area that we have got concerns about is women alone in the 50-plus age group. Where are the jobs for this particular group? They are not there. It is hard enough for our young people to find jobs let alone a woman or any person over the age of 50. It is just a joke. There needs to be a lot of work done in the select committee for us to consider that this bill would be acceptable to New Zealand First. Smoke and mirrors around benefit figures and training does not mean that real jobs are available for the groups that are actually targeted by this legislation. So New Zealand First does not support this legislation at this stage. We will be looking very closely at it when it comes back into the House.