The truth is out!
Sue Bradford questioned Minister of Social Development and Employment Paula Bennett in Parliament today.
Last week Paula Bennett revealed a supposed job creation agreement with McDonalds during a select committee meeting at Parliament. The agreement will (according to Bennett):
…provide up to 7000 unemployed for the fast-food chain’s restaurant expansion plans over the next five years…
Her Deputy Chief Executive said:
Under the deal with McDonald’s, Work and Income would help with the recruitment and training of 7000 staff in service roles and “positions which provide a career path”, Work and Income deputy chief executive Patricia Reade said.
“We’re very pleased that we will be able to offer unemployed people over the next five years opportunities in the food and hospitality trade,” she said.
McDonald’s intends to open 30 new restaurants over the next five years.
But today, under questioning from Sue Bradford, Paula Bennett has been caught out telling fibs. As Paula Bennett told Sue Bradford in Parliament:
It is a job subsidy for long-term beneficiaries, and it has been around for years. The job subsidy that goes with the individual is not new. The partnership and the way that we access those employees are different, but the job funding is not different or exceptional.
So there is nothing new about the arrangement with McDonalds. There is no special agreement – it is just what they have inherited from governements past. As Paula now admits, it’s been around for years.
As I suspected, National has no idea about how to create jobs and stimulate the economy in a recession. They won’t buy into the Green New Deal proposals, apart from the home insulation one that Labour had already been dragged screaming and kicking to agree to before the election.
This really is a clueless government as far as dealing with the recession goes. They sit back, hope all will come right in a year or two (in time for the next election) and watch untold thousands of New Zealanders being thrown on the unemployment scrapheap.
And their solution is to trot out an job placement and subsidy initiative that has existed for the last couple of decades in the hope that New Zealanders will see this as something new and McDonalds uptake of it as the solution to our financial and employment crisis.
Anyway, Paula, would you like fries with your financial and employment crisis? Because the economy and the unemployment statistics won’t come right until you actually do something, rather than rely on the somewhat parsimonious initiatives of those who have done something before you.
g.blog 
I agree with what you say Ari – but don’t think a ‘Green New Deal’ makes any sense as the answer..
So what are your thoughts about how we can start clawing our way out of this recession, beat up? The National government seems bereft of ideas, and Labour doesn’t seem to be putting up any alternatives to the Nats’ “sit on their hands” approach.
Toad wrote this one. 😉
I’m actually coming around to the view that the Government isn’t entirely incompetent, but is rather struggling with the fact that their economic worldview is falling to pieces around them and having trouble admitting to themselves that maybe, just maybe, it’s jobs that stimulate the economy, not the economy that stimulates jobs.
You can certainly see in their mis-management that this is the delusion they’ve been operating under: “our tax cuts will be a big stimulus because they’ll pump money into the general economy, which is the only way to make jobs.” is practically written all over these statements about how large our stimulus was. The operative question is whether it’s intrinsic incompetence or self-deluding worldviews. I’m actually hoping it’s the latter- if it’s the former we’re screwed for two and a half more years, but if it’s the latter there’s always the hope that their brains will shift out of neutral and back into first before the election.
All I know is that you have to have productive jobs. I hate that word ‘productive’ because it arouses the aura of a boring dry dyed-in-the-wool economist.
But it is the truth. Productivity is about the most efficient use of human and capital resources – ie the smart way to go about things. It is not about working harder, it is not about wasting more resources, it is about figuring that we are in recession because we are such waste-pots and identifying how things work in a better-oiled machine.
As an observer and not a genius of any kind – its up to the experts & entrepreneurs to figure that out. But our talent has been operating for a long time under government distortion, so I believe the government needs to get out of people’s lives – so yeah, I favour tax cuts – but not the slap-dash National ones – a whole new system is the best way out.
Also, can’t really call politicians ‘incompetents’ can I? If they were totally incompetent, they’d never get there, surely.
On jobs, the government can’t create jobs fullstop. Any dollar you tax to create that job, takes that money away from where it would have been used to create a job anyway – it merely politicises an area of the economy, its smoke & mirrors.
The only way you ‘create’ jobs is by producing more value and creating the value to fund the job.
What always amazes me is that technology progresses and progresses and yet we end up working harder and longer and much less productively because we are so burdened with stress & debt..I think the government has a lot to answer for in economic and social policy for that..