Salesa JennyJENNY SALESA (Labour—Manukau East): Thank you very much for this opportunity to contribute to the general debate. Fakalofa lahi atu and happy Niue Language Week. Before I go on to the topic of my general debate I would like to address a couple of things that the previous speaker spoke about. He said that their Government the National Government is focused on measures and targets—but is it actually measuring child poverty? Has it even decided to define child poverty? Does it even have a target for child poverty? The answer to all of those questions is: absolutely not. The things that this current National Government is focused on are not the right kinds of things. It is my pleasure to take this call because today we have a new report that was released by the Salvation Army—the What Next? report. We have known for a while that a lot of our young people especially those who are facing persistent systematic challenges with regard to the labour market are not actually getting the right kinds of outcomes. What has this current Government done? Well it has implemented various things. Let us look at Youth Guarantee a programme that when the Prime Minister announced its implementation he was quoted as saying: the bottom line is this—the days of 16- and 17-year-olds being able to leave school and drift along aimlessly while being financially supported by the Government are at an end." But when we look at the evaluation of Youth Guarantee has it delivered? No. What we know from the evaluation of Youth Guarantee is that if you are a young person and you are aged 16 or 17 the likelihood of you ending up on a benefit and becoming unemployed is so much higher. We have an additional 2020 young people receiving benefits now after participating in Youth Guarantee. There are 869 more people who are not in education employment or training and 440 fewer people in full employment after participating in Youth Guarantee. If I can go back to the report that was just released the Salvation Army's report I would like to commend Alan Johnson and the Salvation Army for the work that they do. These are some of the things that this report highlighted: New Zealand is going to be short by about 300000 workers over the next 10 years. We have already every week about 900 people who are reaching retirement age. But are we producing enough apprenticeships to make sure that the housing shortages and the shortages we have in terms of apprenticeships and skilled people are actually coming through to replace those who are going to be retiring and who are already retiring every week? The answer to that is absolutely no we are not. In terms of apprenticeships this Government has various initiatives to address apprenticeships but what we know from the Salvation Army's report is we have close to a one-third decline in building apprenticeships between when this Government came into power in 2008 and 2012. In fact in terms of numbers we have an overall number of 11560 fewer apprenticeships right now compared to when the Government came into power in 2008. In terms of this current Government's job-related training what we also know as highlighted by the Salvation Army is that we have 70000 young people between the ages of 15 and 19 years of age who are not in education employment or training. We have for those who are aged between 20 and 24 50000 young people who are persistently outside of education or training. So when I hear folks from the other side of the House saying how wonderful they are doing and how they are ensuring that young people—and they are actually focused on outcomes. They are not focused on outcomes for young people. Otherwise we would not be seeing these numbers coming out of the Salvation Army's report. We should not wait on a third-party like the Salvation Army to point out just how much this Government has failed and not addressed our young people. Thank you very much."