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Source: ONE News -
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While the job summit is undoubtedly John Key's initiative, Finance Minister Bill English is the one tasked with finding the money to pay for any new ideas.
Two hundred heads of industry, commerce, local authorities and trade unions are meeting on Friday to discuss ideas for mitigating unemployment in the current economic downturn.
"We're going to have a lot of people there from the coal face of employment. They'll have some ideas that the government is going to pick up quite quickly, others that will no doubt need more development through the public policy process," says English.
But with the government's falling revenue and bulging deficits, English warns that proposals tabled at the summit will have to be cost effective.
He says practical ideas that assist confidence and employment are the key.
"There is limited amount of [government] money. We're already dealing with a very fast rising burden of debt, so expensive ideas will have to meet a pretty high hurdle of effectiveness," he says.
The government says it would like to see every job saved, but it remains realistic about what it can achieve.
"The forecasts will tell us unemployment will go up to six or 7% - that's far too many lost jobs. But, we aren't going to be able to roll back the waves that are washing up here from the worldwide recession," says English.
And, he says everybody needs to muck in to improve the country's economic strength, saying he would like to see the private sector pitch in with solutions
"We've got to focus on getting the economy ready for coming out of the recession so we get the lift in investment that's going to create the jobs to replace those that are lost," he says.
Unions are also key, providing representation for New Zealand's workers.
Andrew Cassidy from the Bank Workers' Union says there are many ways in which the financial sector he is involved in can help.
He says using banks to provide government guarantees or partial guarantees to small business lending will help keep up cash flow.
Cassidy is advocating job protection.
"We're one of the few companies in the world that don't actually actively protect some of our jobs...and it's time to look at whether or not that's an appropriate thing to be doing in this environment," he says.
"It's ludicrous that banks that make $1 billion or more should be sending jobs offshore to India. It's ludicrous that we can't make our own defence force clothing in New Zealand...we send it to China".
Meanwhile, the chairman of the event, NZX CEO Mark Weldon, says the government needs to act quickly on initiatives that come out of the summit.
"The first thing that happens in a recession is that equity markets fall and that happened last year, the second is GDP and property markets fall, and the third is that unemployment starts to rise," he says.
Weldon says New Zealand is at the juncture of job losses and swift and effective action is critical.
"If the summit happens and then everyone sits around...and analyses it to perfection rather than focusing on implementation, then it won't work," he says.
TVNZ will have comprehensive coverage of the Jobs Summit with live coverage of the event on TVNZ 7 and TVNZ.co.nz, as well as reports throughout the day from TVNZ reporters on site.
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