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.
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