-
Social Development Minister Paula Bennett - Source: ONE News -
Watch Video
-
Related
The government is calling on councils to use a $1 million fund to boost youth employment as it faces calls to take action over youth unemployment.
Thursday's Household Labour Force Survey showed unemployment running at 7.3% in the December quarter, up from 6.5% and higher than the government had expected.
Among those aged 15-24 unemployment was running at 18.4%, up 6.4 percentage points from the last quarter.
Social Development Minister Paula Bennett has issued a press release on Friday highlighting that money is available from a fund to employ or train young people.
"The Youth Development Partnership Fund provides a great opportunity for councils to work with young people to create local education, training, and employment projects," Bennett says.
"I strongly encourage local groups and councils to get involved and work together with the government to provide opportunities for our young people. This is your chance to step up."
Round six of the fund is open for applications until March 19.
Others have different ideas for the government to tackle the issue.
Tertiary Education Union president Dr Tom Ryan says the government should remove the student numbers cap in universities, polytechnics and wananga.
"New Zealand's tertiary institutions, especially our polytechnics, can help young people get the skills they need to find jobs. But they can't do it when the government is preventing them taking on these young people as new students. The government needs to remove the student cap it has imposed on tertiary institutions and let in these young people," Ryan says.
The shock spike in the rate pushed the New Zealand dollar down and caused economists to back off predictions of interest rate hikes.
"Importantly, the RBNZ was looking for an unemployment rate of just 6.6% and a peak of only 6.7%. Clearly this prediction has been blown out of the water," BNZ economists say.
Yet BNZ says the data is consistent with a recovering economy. A net 2,000 people lost their jobs in the December quarter compared to an average of 17,000 a quarter over the previous nine months.
An unexpected rise in the labour force participation rate helped boost the number of job seekers. The labour force participation rate increased by 0.1 percentage points to 68.1% during the latest quarter.
Strong migration flows are bolstering the number of people in the labour force and the participation rate is high for a recession, BNZ says.
