Looking ahead, the main labour market issues facing New Zealand are likely to revolve around labour shortages rather than too few jobs. This is a good position to be in, but it will raise its own set of challenges.

The Ministry is increasingly focused on ensuring sole parents, older people and people on sickness and invalid’s benefits are well placed to participate in the gains made in the labour market. Work offers the best opportunity for people and their families to improve their living standards.

The government’s benefit reform proposals also provide us with an ideal opportunity to examine the better ways of supporting those New Zealanders for whom work is not an option.

In the past 12 years New Zealand has come a long way. The Ministry of Social Development is committed to building on these successes and ensuring all New Zealanders can take advantage of the progress achieved.

We must take into account that a lot of people are low-paid and employed in vulnerable sectors of the economy at a time of rising costs of transport and housing.

New Zealand is slow to anticipate the big shifts in thinking and the structural changes re fossil fuel dependency which are being forced by climate change.

There are issues with an aging population, but South Auckland particularly has a youthful population and many job-poor communities.

Solutions will need to be developed at the local level by bringing together people and resourcing initiatives. The role of the community sector and social enterprises will be important for tackling the economic dimension of social issues and defining the good work which needs to be done.

The main issues for the future may well be the employment effects of climate change, energy crises and so forth. But in terms of employment and poverty, the main issues include:

Developing and maintaining active labour market policies that can support workers in transition as we invest more and more in technology and skills to lift levels of productivity (value);

Supporting a state that can harness resources for collective investments rather than downsize due to constant pressure for tax cuts;

Addressing equity issues that continue in relation to Maori and Pacific Peoples unemployment levels;

Work-life balance;

A constant focus on investment in the people who need it most.

The issues for the future will be the identification of causes of ‘why we are as we are’ and then spreading this understanding widely to empower people to make personal changes; and, the acceptance that — as we’ve all grown up under the existing system — we also have suffered from this deprivation.

And we must recognise that in any society, there must be some values, attitudes, skills and knowledge that are absolutely essential for it to prosper or survive, and that these must be personally gained by all within its populace.

Two issues we then face are: establishing new socialisation processes to ensure deprivation no longer continues; and helping those who have unconsciously suffered deprivation through failure of the socialisation they experienced.

I believe the following points are vital when we are considering the factors behind this holistic failure:

Every person when born, has potential as a human social being, but this potential has to be fostered for them to achieve feelings of self worth, personal achievement and contentment as contributing members of society. The greater the failure in this regard, the more likely their responses, especially in times of stress, will be basically anti-social, selfish survival instincts and ultimately unfulfilled adults.

Every person when born is a potential parent, but these skills and responsibilities must be fostered in all, if society is to flourish through the resulting contributions of its individuals. Similarly, the greater the failure in this regard, the more likely their responses, especially in times of stress, will be basic selfish survival instincts and again unfulfilled adults.

The prison population, number of police, number of politically correct laws, number of lawyers/judges and courts, and when society basically uses money as the measure of a person, or a business’ worth rather than what they are contributing to the well–being of society, are all indicators of the ‘health of that society.’

Looking ahead, one cannot ignore the ageing of our workforce and its increasing cultural diversity. The median age in New Zealand is currently 36 years, with some 25% of the workforce over 50. In 12 years time, the median age will be 40 years and some 30% of the workforce will be over 50. Social and ethnic diversity is expanding: the proportion of Maori, Pacific and Asian peoples in the labour force will rise by another 3-4 percentage points over this period. Successfully managing this changing workforce will be essential for productivity growth and social cohesion.

Notwithstanding the tremendous gains in labour force participation, we still have large numbers of people on-benefit, with limited engagement in the workforce. Unless we can successfully transition more sole parents, sick and disabled back into work, income and other disparities will widen further.

I anticipate that, as important as these transitions into the labour force are, our focus will increasingly shift to the nature of transitions and relationships that occur inside the workplace. While attaining a step on the ladder is an essential first step, the path to higher incomes is still often fraught for many. As we gain new understanding of our dynamic labour market, I expect we will be challenged in what can be done to support successful upward mobility of those in work, to support real income growth for the lower skilled, and how to achieve higher productivity from our workforce.

The quality of work, productivity, lifetime learning, the balance between employee and employer responsibility for training, the role of mandated rewards to work versus negotiated ones and those resulting from skills and performance will all be vigorous debates.

Issues for the future will include ...

Negotiating — across diverse cultural world views — an agreed set of shared values and principles to underscore what it means to be a responsible New Zealand citizen in the 21st century.

Breaking the cycle of intergenerational poverty, low school achievement, poor health, drug and alcohol addiction, child abuse and domestic violence.

Tackling employment issues of the low waged and ‘working poor’.

Creating and sustaining an attractive and affordable lifestyle for young people and their families to retain skills and talent in New Zealand.

Accelerating opportunities for more trade apprenticeships to address skill gaps.

Understanding and communicating effectively the economic opportunities for the application of unique intellectual and cultural capital in a global market.

Recognising that the above issues cannot be tackled successfully without a public commitment to pioneer and resource new solutions that engage the public with the private.

The isssues for the future:

Ensuring that we retain our best and brightest in New Zealand or at least attract them back after their 'OE’.

Ensuring that we attract some of the best and brightest migrants and once they are here to make sure we can fully utilise their skills.

Ensuring that all young New Zealander have a good grounding in numeracy and literacy and that a high proportion of New Zealanders attain a good tertiary education.

Linked to the above, ensuring that boys and young men are able to achieve educationally at the same rate as girls and young women and linked further to this ensuring that young Pacific and Maori men increase their educational attainment.

We must also ensure that the labour market does not develop into a dual labour market with one group of New Zealanders in the core labour market and another on the margins.

Paul Dalziel, Professor of Economics at Lincoln University

Ironically, (given where we started 12 years ago) part of the problem appears to be our jobs. Low-paid work, multiple job holdings including night-time work, casual employment punctuated by spells of unemployment, poor work-life balance, non-family-friendly workplaces, high average working hours per week — these all contribute to greater personal and social pressures on households with children. It would be a great achievement if we succeeded in reducing those pressures by 2018.

The Labour-led Government has three core themes: economic transformation, families — young and old and national identity.

Economic transformation requires a skilled workforce, globally competitive business, strong infrastructure, and environmental sustainability. Our focus must remain on building a world-class economy with security and opportunity for everyone.

Families — young and old is about every family being safe and secure, free from poverty and violence, and nurturing for all its members. The Labour-led Government’s focus is on strengthening and extending early intervention services for young children and families, giving them the best chance for success.

National identity is about how we see ourselves as New Zealanders and the pride we take in who we are and where we live. We will continue working towards a prosperous, confident nation that attracts people from around the world and is known for its environment, cultural identity, and opportunities.

Issues for the future include working to decrease the rich/poor gap by: lifting wages and conditions for those in work; transforming the welfare system on principles of simplicity, sufficiency and universality; and doing more to ensure that there is affordable, secure, healthy housing for all.

Proactively work to keep jobs and nurture job growth in New Zealand — a responsibility of all sectors — private, government, local government and community. Unemployment is very unlikely to remain as low as it is now.

Doing more to support and encourage good work for young people, mature age jobseekers, tangata whenua, Pasifika peoples, migrants and refugees and people who are sick, injured or have long-term impairments.

In the absence of policies to address poverty and income inequality, the next 12 years will be spent dealing with the social fallout of the last 20. If we ignore increasing poverty, the ensuing lack of social cohesion will be within the context of ever more volatile external environment, and the continued outward flow of jobs to developing economies. We need to focus on investing in the next generation so we have a healthy, capable population and communities, able to support each other in our increasingly uncertain world. Dealing with social, educational and health problems will need a broader focus than simply 'changing attitudes’, and this change in focus needs to start now.

Issues for the future will be:

The quantity of paid work: not just the number of jobs, but the spread of hours — whether too long (understaffing) or too short (casualisation) — and the total burden of paid and unpaid work combined.

The quality of paid jobs: for example, how to ensure minimum pay and conditions for contract workers, such as the increasingly vital home caregiver sector.

The widening gap between the comfortable (not all of whom work long hours for pay) and the deprived (not all of whom are outside the paid workforce, let alone the unpaid workforce) — and their children, who are everyone’s future.

How we recognise and support unpaid work, in a culture where paid work is so increasingly dominant — even though the realities of unglamorous, everyday work are increasingly invisible.

And above all, how we make such issues central to public debate.

The issues for the future will be how to fill skill shortages as well as how to retain in New Zealand (or attract back) skilled young people needed for our economy. While we cannot compete with salaries overseas even in Australia we can compete on quality of life.

I still believe there is a need to survey school leavers in their last year at school to find out what their career aspirations are and then follow them up the following year to see where they ended up. In many areas in New Zealand we are doing surveys of local businesses and gathering info on present and future skill sets they need. We have no way of matching up these needs with the career and job aspirations of our young people either locally regionally or nationally.

I believe the Mayors Taskforce for Jobs have done a great job together with The Jobs Letter over the last few years in highlighting the need for more young people to take up trade apprenticeships and we have succeeded with central government in raising the numbers on the Modern Apprenticeship scheme with the result that more young (and not so young) are taking up trade training. However there will be shortages soon in the health services, hospitality industry, engineering and science (and probably others) and we do not know how many of our young people are being encouraged to pursue careers in these areas of existing and future workforce shortages.

In my own area — local government — we will also have to look at how to attract and retain staff in areas of existing and potential shortages e.g. planners, engineers, building inspectors, policy analysts etc. In a country the size of New Zealand we should be doing school leaver surveys such as this. I believe in the UK every school leaver is surveyed as to their future career aspirations — if they can do this surely we can! There was a trial in three areas including my own in 2002-2003 but this was stopped after two years. It provided us with invaluable data on areas we needed to focus on.

An associated issue would have to be to provide more support and resources to career services in schools. The Designing Careers pilot projects need to roll out to all schools. I have had positive feedback from two schools in my area as to the value of this programme that they both want to see continue in their schools. Ideally the Career Aspirations and destinations surveys should be incorporated into this programme.

A thoughtful (and, I thought at the time, horribly pessimistic) person said to me in the early 1990s that it would take a generation for New Zealand to recover from the takeover by free-market ideas that had occurred. I now think that is true and so the next 12 years is essentially the other half of that process. The goal: to build and institutionalise a new humanitarian politics in New Zealand. I believe that a lot of the public battle is won. The next 12 years need every caring person to work on the hard part, which is changing the personnel and core policies in government, the public service and other public institutions. In other words, returning the market to its proper place in society and cementing in a new philosophical consensus.

Alister Barry, Documentary maker

The issue for the future will be the acceptance by a politically significant majority of key opinion leaders — and the policy elite — that a return to a policy of full-employment is practical. And that low domestic inflation can be achieved by a mix of economic instruments other than unemployment and the fear of impoverishment.

The issues for the future are the depletion of natural resources, the end of cheap oil, the use of nature as a toilet, global warming, water shortages, rising inequalities between the single figure percentage of super rich from the rest, the rising cost of medical care and education etc., escalating rates and huge national and regional debts, fading retirement and welfare care, increase in fear and insecurity, growing dissatisfaction and resulting abuse, and scape-goating to divert attention from increasing control by the greedy.

The main issues that we will need to focus on in the next 12 years

Kia ora. My name is Grifen. I am from Taranaki, the place I stand, and take my stance. I am Nga Mokai — the tribeless youth, descendant of artists, teachers and healers. I am ready; a warrior, poised, filled with love, courage, hope … and despair. For make no mistake, the very near future is not a friendly place of peace, but a time of turmoil like we have never seen. I believe it will get better. I live in the expectation that I will be there to witness. But first it will get worse.

Whatever eventual form of future emerges, it is being contested and shaped now! The war rages all around. The dominant voices are winning. We are being drowned out in a cacophony of misinformation, found floundering on a beach of kindred bones in a rising sea of our own shit, left gulping in an illusory sea of media induced fantasy … while we hurtle headlong towards impossible futures.

A critical fork in the road is approaching. A fundamental choice looms, a central question posed; is a ‘sustainable’ future possible, yes: or no? If yes, the prospects pivot on your decisions, they are hinged on your actions. The future is contingent upon your will to make your aspirations heard, to make your voice reverberate in the forums of design.

The critical challenge in coming days and decades is to break through the information barriers to the mainstream, to mobilise the collective genius of our people. We must create the space for community conversation about ‘truth’ and real choices, to make the time for behaviour change, and take action in partnership. We must assert our fundamental right and our responsibility to self-determination, to be citizens rather than subjects.

Time is pressing. I for one am ready; Warrior, poised, filled with love, courage, hope…and despair. Abracadabra: I create as I speak. ‘Another world is not only possible, but she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing’. Do you will her hither with me?

Susan St John, Senior Lecturer, University of Auckland Business School

The main issues will be the generation of sufficient political and popular will to shift the required resources in health, education, housing and income to the most deprived families if we are to realise the dream of a productive and happy society.

Skills shortages and an aging, retiring population will definitely change the ‘engine room’ of our economy and our country. Globalisation will keep sending challenges to this small, remote trading nation to remain relevant and viable. We’ll need to be smart, nimble and very strategic with our assets to maintain and improve our current lifestyle.

Environmental issues. Reaching the tipping points of what the planet can handle (personally I place climate change at the top) will question the very core of how we function. Strong leadership, entrepreneurism and innovation will be needed to avoid us placing this complex global problem back into the too hard basket.

Positively, a renaissance in engaged citizenship and altruistic caring will bear fine fruits if we continue to focus on trends that are emerging at present.

Wally Stone, Kaikoura

In the future, employment and poverty will go hand in hand. Unemployment will be replaced by a type of employment that will challenge our whole concept of poverty: the necessity of two-income families to stay ahead of the poverty trap will recreate our concept of family and community. For many, the dream of home ownership will become a nightmare. Reliance on the state will grow, politics and bureaucracy rather than people and community will be the winner. The biggest impact we can have ...is on ourselves first.

The issues for the future will be the ageing population and the subsequent skill shortages as more people retire. This will mean New Zealand will need more migrants to fill these gaps and we need to be more receptive in recognising skills and formal qualifications of these people so they can fully contribute to this country’s future.

We need to ensure how young people are developed to their full potential.

Three issues for the future are:

Older worker retention and age discrimination for mature job seekers and the need for a better co-ordinated employment strategy will be a major issue in the next decade;

Ensuring that quality flexible work options are available to both men and women in employment;

Ensuring that ‘life long learning’ and skills becomes the norm not the exception and the gap between ‘work rich’ and ‘work poor’ narrows.

The issues for the future now are...

Low wages for youth; unemployment that remains high amongst racial groups — upwards of 8%; child poverty which under reliable international measures, is high; and inequality of income, which has increased every year since 1988.

Women as a group are doing better than other definable groups in closing the income gap against male rates. But youth, also Asian and other immigrant groups, Pacific Islanders and Maori, when compared to the median and upper wages, are not doing better.

Major redistributive programmes such as the Labour Government’s Working for Families’ tax rebates address this, but only in part. The government claim that this programme will reduce child poverty by 70% by 2007 depends on the take-up rate. Militating against that rate, as is usual with anything to do with transfers of income from state to individuals, is a bureaucracy that wields complex formulae.

Note, when assessing the future how quickly in 2004 the government disassembled its ‘Closing the Gaps’ programme after National detected that its emphasis on Maori did not have mainstream support.

In assessing the future we should note that affluence has weakened New Zealanders’ traditional demand for equality of health, education and opportunity. The poor get less sympathy. Partly this is because the middle class knows that modern poverty is defined in relative terms — as those households that, after allowing for housing costs, have less than 60% of the median income. The New Zealand poor are not as badly off as they were, say, 30 years ago. Something like 40% of Pacific Islanders, Asians and other immigrant groups, 24% of Maori, and 16% or Europeans live in officially defined poverty. But while these households struggle, there is more opportunity for jobs than previously, the wages for the employed, though low, have risen. And in support of making a low wage go further, there’s the Warehouse.

That, like it or not, is the attitude, and so the classic redistribution of income by a Labour Government will probably not remain at the centre of the game. Rather than gifts from above, I’d hope for investment down below. I’d hope that innovation and infrastructure development will in future yield wealth in the lower-income communities. The government should assist such small-scale infrastructure.

Renewable energy, as one example, is now an emerging economic sector. Biofuels production seems a genuine employment opportunity for this country — it presently contributes one million jobs worldwide, and we’ve as yet paid it little attention. Investment in such infrastructure has the merit of being decentralised. Why not trucks to collect biomass material in the countryside? Why not digesters within every small community to take this material? Why not a bit more trust and support for the skills and leadership that is out there? On a table just put out by the Worldwatch Institute, New Zealand gets only two ticks out of a possible range of 10 for renewable energy promotion policies. That’s well below the average for developed countries worldwide, below Australia’s four or China’s six.

Tourism is another area where local start-ups will become significant. New Zealand has landscapes of huge variety from the small warm beaches of the North to the chiselled mountains of the South. Our land is diverse and sufficiently isolated to be an intriguing corner of the world. We will further open countryside and forest and mountain to individual exploration and risk. Our own Te Araroa — The Long Pathway — is part of that — a 2,920 km corridor with huts and small enterprise such as marae stays that will emerge along its length.

Policies which address poverty and income inequalities directly are essential. Poverty impoverishes us all and the cost of neglecting poverty is high for society as a whole. The need for child-focussed policies is particularly acute. A champion of children in Cabinet or as Prime Minister is sorely needed. The wise words anthropologist Dame Anne Salmond should be heeded by politicians and policymakers: “An aging society that does not take care of its young has a death wish”.

Issues for the future will be the same ones we have been banging on for the last 12 years — the ageing workforce and the need to change our thinking around work structure.

I would probably amend this first in light of the upcoming decade of the changing workforce demography — which picks up older, younger, ethnic diversity etc.. Much (not all) of the current obsession with 'skills shortage’ is about perceived fit in our view: why can’t your next apprentice electrician be 55 years old, your salesman be African, or your planner have a disability. Your next worker may not be the same as your last.

The flexible/changing nature side will be the major frontier for employers and society to grapple with. Not only does it need to deal with the changing nature of how workers want to or could sell their time (e.g. more outcomes rather than inputs focused); it will be driven by energy and travel demands, work/life (or life/work) balance, technological advancements, and an ageing workforce with different motivations.

Russel Norman, Green Party Co-Leader; Spokesperson on Economics and Trade

Peak oil is going to result in serious structural reform of the economy. The capacity of the world’s oil fields to produce oil is near its peak and world demand isn’t far behind. The difficulty of substituting other commodities for oil means that when demand hits the peak capacity there will be persistently rising oil prices, and possibly a major oil shock. The structural impact on the New Zealand economy will be significant because of the oil inputs into passenger transport, freight transport, agriculture, tourism and most everything else directly or indirectly. The sooner we move to reduce the oil intensity of the economy the lesser will be the impact of that adjustment.

Paul Matheson, Mayor of Nelson / Chair of the Mayors Taskforce for Jobs