Spinning the job market

Written By: - Date published: 9:43 am, March 27th, 2013 - 11 comments
Categories: jobs, john key, national, spin - Tags: , , ,

Audrey Young and Simon Collins should get danger money for spinning this hard:

Cities muffle Christchurch growth

Auckland and Wellington are still dragging down New Zealand’s job market, despite spectacular earthquake recovery-related growth in Christchurch.

Auckland and Wellington are muffling growth and dragging down the New Zealand job market?!? WTF? Auckland and Wellington are the NZ job market.

What is happening in Christchurch is not some norm that is being dragged down, it is a highly unusual situation arising from events well beyond National’s control. A more accurate headline would have been something like “Christchurch rebuild makes NZ job market look a bit less catastrophic than it is“. Here’s the real situation:

Surveys by Seek, the ANZ Bank and the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment all show that job vacancies have flatlined in Auckland and trended downwards in Wellington over the past two years. …

In net terms, employment dropped in the global financial crisis of 2008-09 and recovered slightly in 2010-11, but the picture since then suggests the recovery stalled. Statistics NZ’s quarterly survey of employers recorded a gain of 23,600 jobs (1.4 per cent) last year, but its survey of households estimated a drop of 30,000 (1.3 per cent).

That’s the NZ Job market, courtesy of 4 years of National government. They keep promising 170,000 new jobs, they keep failing to deliver, and the best Key can manage is some meaningless waffle about a “fluid market” for jobs. Yeah it’s fluid all right, it’s going down the gurgler.

11 comments on “Spinning the job market ”

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  1. mickysavage 1
    27 March 2013 at 10:10 am

    And in two successive budgets we were promised 170,000 more jobs. where have they gone?

    • One Tāne Huna 1.1
      27 March 2013 at 10:16 am

      “In any three-month period in New Zealand, our economy creates about 100,000 jobs and about 100,000 disappear,”

      John Key.

      The lying Prime Minister only counts one side of the balance sheet, and bingo! There’s 170,000 new jobs every twenty weeks or so.

      Isn’t it cute how he inflates one figure while deflating the other?

      • DH 1.1.1
        27 March 2013 at 11:39 am

        ““In any three-month period in New Zealand, our economy creates about 100,000 jobs and about 100,000 disappear,”

        That’s complete bullshit. Most of it is people jumping ship. They leave one job to take up a better offer, their old job gets advertised and someone else leaves their job to take it etc etc etc…. they’re not ‘created’ at all it’s just job churn.

        • Lanthanide 1.1.1.1
          27 March 2013 at 2:29 pm

          Even if what Key is presenting here is just the job churn, that number is still very very high.

          I’m guessing we’ve got a workforce of about 1.6-1.7m people or so. 100k changing jobs every 3 months is a turnover of about 23% over the course of a year.

          That seems wrong, 1 out of 4 workers changing jobs in a given year?

          • ghostwhowalksnz 1.1.1.1.1
            27 March 2013 at 4:09 pm

            The point is not about the total number but the difference between them

            108,200 jobs were created and 116,000 were lost in the last quarter for which this data is available, July to September 2011.
            ( nearly 2 years ago)

            So we lost 8000 in 3 months. Which comes out as a yearly rate of 32000 !

  2. Daveo 2
    27 March 2013 at 11:28 am

    To be fair Simon Collins is hardly a right-wing stooge.

  3. karol 3
    27 March 2013 at 11:37 am

    Simon Collins has done a few articles supportive of beneficiaries.

    Why the focus on the cities, where, Anthony rightly says, most of the jobs are currently?

    What is the government doing to promote the less urbanised regions as places to do business, make stuff and work?

    • Poission 3.1
      27 March 2013 at 12:09 pm

      The less urbanized regions often produce more value to the economy (read exports) then AK or Wgtn.The cost of doing business is often less then metropolitan areas, due to the lower cost of property and existing infrastructure..

  4. Rogue Trooper 4
    27 March 2013 at 12:31 pm

    and lately Slippery John has flip-flopped to using the other survey of employment (HLFS). dear oh dear…another senatus consultum from the Staff Corps.

  5. Alethios 5
    27 March 2013 at 2:47 pm

    I feel as if The Standard has missed a great opportunity here, particularly given the recent resurgence of interest in test cricket. Surely a picture of an orange Shane Warne pitching it well outside off and spinning it back to hit leg would have been more appropriate? Disappointed.

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