Salesa JennyJENNY SALESA (Labour—Manukau East): I have attended a few Labour Party annual conferences and the one that we attended last weekend by far has been the most exciting and most inspirational one that I have ever attended. Andrew Little and Labour—we are committed to investing in our people and ensuring opportunities for all and ensuring that we have a comprehensive housing policy. Andrew Little made the commitment that we will address homelessness and ensure that fewer of our families are living in cars or garages. Andrew Little is committed to addressing inequality as well as addressing childhood poverty. Labour during our conference also launched its Future of Work report and I would like to acknowledge and commend my colleague and friend Grant Robertson for leading this project. It was a project that took over 2 years and involved a lot of members of Parliament from the Labour Party but it also involved a lot of presentations—hundreds actually that Grant Robertson himself did—a lot of talking to a lot of people and listening to and gaining the advice from people in the field about what it is that we should do. The Future of Work policy is something that the Labour Party has worked on as I say for about a couple of years but it is one that has actually given us the opportunity to look at how we would address this issue. It is not just the Labour Party in New Zealand that is looking at this issue. There are so many other countries in Europe that are looking at the fact that in the next 10 to 20 years with automation and with technology we will have to address this head-on. Labour is the party of ideas. Over 100 years we have a record of delivering progress for our people. If I can just look at two announcements that this National Government has made today. National is so proud of its two new initiatives that it has chosen today of all days to make its announcement on apprenticeships as well as on the skills hub in Auckland. But why has National chosen today—the day on which the media not just in New Zealand but the media around the world are going to be focused on the US elections? Can I just say that one of those reasons might be that we have 74000 young people who are not in education employment or training. So many of our young people—27500 of those who are neets"—are Māori and over 11000 of them are Pacific which is disproportionate to the numbers that Māori and Pacific make up of the total population. But that is not the only reason I think why National has chosen today to make these announcements. When we look a little bit closer at this $183 million—it sounds like a big amount—it is only $10 million that is new money. When you look closer at the target that the Government has it is going to have 50000 apprenticeships in 4 years. But when National came into Government in 2008 we had at that time 53400 apprenticeships. Today there are only 41800 apprentices.Chris Bishop: No no.JENNY SALESA: There are. Why is it that this number of apprenticeships has dropped dramatically under National? It is because it has not had a focus on apprenticeships and on making sure that it is fixing up its own mess. This is one of the reasons why National is hiding its initiative by announcing it today of all days when everyone else including the New Zealand media is going to be focused on the US elections. We have 12000 young people who are unemployed today and that is 12000 more young people compared with those who were unemployed in 2008. National just does not care enough about our young people. Our Deputy Prime Minister was calling our young people "pretty damned hopeless" and writing them off. This announcement today of two new initiatives is far too little far too late to fix the damage that National has done. Let us look at what happened in 2013. It was the year that Hawkins Construction and Fletcher Building as well as Auckland Council and many others wrote a report called Workforce Skills Roadmap for Auckland Construction Sector (2013-2018) and presented it to the Hon Steven Joyce. That particular report mapped out that in Auckland they are going to be short by 32000 skilled people by 2018. This announcement today is too little too late."