McCardle: "This initiative aims to provide significant impetus to increasing the number of job seekers in community work by organisations outside the central Government bureaucracy. I am acutely aware of the links and extra strengths that many community organisations have in assisting unemployed job seekers, and this strategy aims to capture that strength..." McCardle says that the new money will assist with strengthening and refocussing existing community organisations' activities into brokering community work opportunities for long-term and disadvantaged job seekers in particular.

This whole process is going to be administered and supported through the Community Employment Group (CEG) who will be paid $1.2m of the $5.3 to provide field work support to the CBOs and to evaluate the initiative.

Who will be chosen as a CBO? CEG and NZES are presently inviting proposals from selected existing organisations ... especially those already working with the CEG priority groups: long-term unemployed people, Maori, Pacific Islands people, women, and people living in disadvantaged urban and rural communities. CEG will enter into 12-month contracts with the selected CBOs.

Sources press statements and background information from Peter McCardle Minister of Employment 28 September 1997, emailed to the Jobs Letter.

Tamihere agrees with the co-ordination of projects being put out to community organisations: "... But what I would like to see simultaneously is the downsizing of CEG and NZES, so that the real resources also shift across to us. Otherwise you are just building a third or fourth level of bureaucracy..."

Source phone conversation with Jobs Letter editor Vivian Hutchinson

The Sunday News last weekend branded the scheme a "Maori Job Bribe", and quoted one Wellington TOPS trainer as saying: "It's racist, scandalous even. We have always treated Maori and Pakeha students equally. Now we're being told not to... in this day and age its appalling..." United leader Peter Dunne questions whether the scheme would pass a Human Rights Commission scrutiny: "Most people who are unemployed want work regardless of the colour of their skin..."

Max Kerr, ETSA general manager, says that Te Ararau had not been checked with the Human Rights Commission, but he was sure it was on safe ground. He says the scheme was necessary because Maori were not equally represented in industry training, and extra efforts were needed to help them get this training.

Sources The Sunday News 28 September 1997 "Maori Job Bribe" by Simon Bradwell; and The Dominion 29 September 1997 "Maori job-finder fee defended"

The Code of Social Responsibility was an idea signalled in the Budget by Winston Peters, and is part of NZ First policies. Mr Peters has indicated that the Code could include benefit cuts.
Social Welfare Minister Roger Sowry denies that the benefit-cutting plans in the Treasury paper are being taken seriously by cabinet in its process of drawing of the Code. Sowry: "This is not a benefit-cutting exercise ... I want to make it clear that the Code will cover all NZ'ers. It won't be targeted at one particular group in society..."

Source The Dominion 23 September 1997 "Benefits safe from social code cuts, says Sowry" by Helen Bain

"What we are talking about is a code of social responsibility a form of contract between a welfare recipient and the state. In the future we hope to provide beneficiaries with a plan that details what the government expects of them in exchange for the help they receive from taxpayers ..."
-- Social Welfare Minister Roger Sowry

"Suddenly a select group of government members, in league with a bunch of Treasury officials, have decided that they hold the key to perfect parenting. They're going to tell the rest of the country how to be proper mothers and fathers.
"This will have a negative impact on the children. They are the ones who will pay for their parents failure to meet someone else's idea of perfect ..."
-- Maori Council chairman Sir Graham Latimer, concerned that the Code could endanger the human rights of all NZ'ers.

"Docking $30 off a benefit from parents who do not try to get their truant kids back to school is a nonsense idea. And giving that $30 to the school to pay the costs of getting a child back to school is even greater nonsense ..."
-- Educational Institute national president Bill Noble

"By the time you've had people to assess that the benefit should be docked, and then you give it to whichever agency is going to spend it on the child, and then they review the parents' performance, you've spent a whole lot more money and welfare resources, and probably not solved the problem..."
-- Labour's Social Welfare spokesman Steve Maharey

"If you've got an alcoholic mother and you dock $40 from her benefit and spend it directly on the child, then that's all you've done. There's nothing there that addresses the alcoholism or any other of the problems that family has that is causing the child's neglect..."
-- Child researcher David Fergusson

"It must be acknowledged that it's not just beneficiaries who need encouragement to be responsible parents. Rather than limiting a code of social responsibility to punitive measures, it should also include parenting education and support..." -- NZ First Youth Affairs Minister Deborah Morris

Source press statement from Peter McCardle 22 September 1997

Information technology positions continue to be the main staff shortages, followed by sales positions. Job losses are expected for those in human resources and manufacturing blue collar jobs.

Source New Zealand Herald 17 September 1997 "Less optimism over employing staff" by Tom Clarke

The Auckland District Law Society is questioning the practice and warns employers that they could be on shaky legal grounds. The Society's employment spokesman, Phil Ahern, says that under privacy legislation, personal information must not be collected by unfair means and must be relevant to the job being sought. Because employers could threaten applicants by withholding a job if they did not sign the release form, it could be argued that consent was being gained under duress.

Source New Zealand Herald 20 September 1997 "Privacy fear over check on job seekers" by Nick Smith.

Source brochures from the Peace Foundation 1997

Source email from Celia Briar <C.J.Briar@massey.ac.nz> 15 Sep 1997

US-based economist Robert Theobald is presently touring Australia with talks on "The Future of Work". If the response to his Sunday night lectures on ABC Radio National is anything to go by, people are beginning to listen to his ideas which challenge traditional notions of success. The Sydney Morning Herald says that responses to his talks have been "extraordinary" and the ABC radio network says it has been swamped with requests for transcripts of his radio series.

Theobald believes the world has moved out of the industrial era into "a new set of social, political and economic realities for which we are ill-prepared" Theobald: "There is a growing interest in the issues of work, jobs, resources, purpose and prestige and the developing understanding that we need profoundly new patterns of thinking in this area. I want to make people aware that they must start to live the questions rather than the answers, and that the language in which we talk must be personal and not technical ..."

When it comes to employment issues, Theobald says we are hypnotised by the wrong issue: "...that jobs are the answer, that there will always be enough jobs, that we have to create enough demand for enough jobs. We have wrapped everything into our jobs..." Theobald says there is "no earthly reason why we should not imagine a culture in which most people enjoy what they are doing most of the time".

One of Theobald's recommendations on tackling unemployment is to help couples who want one person to stay home understand the financial gain and losses from both of them going out to work. He says he has found it almost impossible to persuade any agency to take on this task of looking at the data and adopting a neutral stance on the question of dual-income families.

Theobald: "I think we have a whole group of women who are now so committed to the idea that women should have the right to be in the labour force that we have forgotten that women or men also have got the right to raise a family..."

Source Sydney Morning Herald 24 September 1997 "Full pay packet is no guarantee of happiness" by Helen Trinca

Macfarlane told a conference of Japanese fund managers that a long economic expansion would help unemployment, as should "micro-economic reforms". He left open the likelihood of further interest cuts, saying monetary policy "had to make a contribution" towards having sustainable growth.

Source The Independent 26 September 1997 "Reserve Bank governor focuses on jobs"

Source BBC Breakfast with Frost 28 September 1997 Interview with Gordon Brown by David Frost