Borrows Chester: General Debate 
Borrows Chester: General Debate 
[Volume:656;Page:5469] 
CHESTER BORROWS (National—Whanganui) 
: 
 It is interesting as the years creep on to reflect from time to time on where we find ourselves philosophically with regard to where we have been in the past. Over the weekend I had the opportunity to listen to a keynote address from John Key as he outlined a policy for the development of opportunities for our young people. I was reminded of a time when I leaned significantly to the left and of a time when I made a decision to start leaning a little more closely to the right. It was an unusual time for me. It was in 1987 and it was at a time when the Government of the day decided that it would treat people who were unemployed as a commodity. 
The Minister of Labour at that time decided that he would stop trying to find work opportunities for young people on the dole under the then Project Employment Programme or PEP scheme and would just pay the dole because it was too expensive to do anything more than just administrate the unemployment benefit. Thousands and thousands of people around New Zealand found themselves with nothing to do having been turning up and looking for job initiatives on a day-by-day basis. I was a sole charge police officer stationed in a small Taranaki town called Patea. The Minister’s decision had an immediate effect on me as everyone went out on the turps got drunk and started fighting one another and I was johnny-on-the-spot. I made the decision that I would join the National Party. I have to confess here that it took me some time to complete the change of horses but I look back to that particular day and realise that that was when I started to change my philosophy. 
I believe that young people who find themselves unemployed at the moment through this recessionary period are some of the most vulnerable people in the country. We know that these youth these people aged between 18 and 24 make up about 35 percent of the unemployment statistics and that Maori and Pacific Island peoples are well and truly overrepresented in those statistics. I am so pleased then to be part of a Government that will not treat these young people like some sort of butter mountain it needs to deal with and get rid of or to sell to the lowest bidder. The Government is prepared to take steps that will work increasingly in a way that will see these young people get into a line of work that may well set them up for a life that will change their chances and their perspective on life. 
For instance the programme called Job Ops will place 4000 people in employment. Within the first day of being back in my electorate from that announcement having been made I was approached by employers who were wondering how they could access that programme and they were telling me about the positions they would create for young people within the community. Another initiative that will go down very well within my electorate is Community Max which will place 3000 people on programmes where the Government will provide a supervisor and pay the minimum wage for 30 hours a week in order to get young people involved in working on projects within their communities. Some of those community projects are around kohanga reo and marae and other community projects have been identified already by the Ministry of Maori Affairs in respect of our community. 
Whanganui has a particular vulnerability because Wanganui City has traditionally had a workforce engaged in relatively low-wage manufacturing and parallel agricultural enterprises and the entry of young people into the workforce has traditionally been through things like the freezing works and other manufacturing enterprises within the city. With the very difficult times through the 1980s which continued on through the 1990s those jobs were significantly rationalised and the people who had been working within those industries tended to stay there. If we go around those workplaces now we see very few young people entering the workforce and taking up work within those types of occupations. A lot of the people there have tenures well in excess of 20 years; they are not moving on. So young people within my electorate are particularly vulnerable at the moment if they are leaving school in respect of their finding work opportunities within Wanganui and a lot of the young people who are out of work do not have the option of moving away. To then find we have $152 million to be put into this work enterprise and initiative which is designed to getting young people into work is absolutely fantastic.