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# Who’s Going to Create The Jobs?
- URL: https://goodoil.news/whos-going-to-create-the-jobs/
- Published: 2026-10-14T20:30:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-14T20:29:59.000Z
- Description: I've examined what every major party is proposing to do about unemployment.
- Author: Reproduced with permission
- Tags: NZ Politics, Election 2026, Employment

[**Ani O’Brien**](https://aniobrien.substack.com/p/everybodys-promising-jobs)  
*Like good faith disagreements and principled people. Dislike disingenuousness and Foucault. Care especially about women’s rights, justice, and democracy.*

Unemployment is at an 11-year high, young people are struggling to get a foot in the door, and political parties are making some very expensive promises. We are being offered a macro approach by those who are attuned to the needs of business, but perhaps less familiar with the struggle to find work. And we are being offered pie in the sky solutions from those who would possibly be among the unemployed were we not paying their generous salaries. On the whole things don’t feel particularly bright and yet *jobs* is one of the words of this election. So I thought I would take a closer look at what is on offer and how parties are approaching our unemployment challenges.

National is promising 220,000 jobs by 2030\. The Greens have now announced a nearly $6 billion economic development package they claim will create another 64,000 jobs on top of Treasury’s forecasts, alongside a multibillion-dollar programme to guarantee work for young people. Labour wants to revive construction employment, subsidise apprenticeships, and guarantee jobs for nursing graduates. Winston Peters wants to return to full employment as an explicit economic objective, while ACT is arguing that the country needs to stop making employment prohibitively expensive in the first place.

There are some vastly different ideas being proffered of what government can, and should, do to solve this problem. Some are more persuasive than others. But before I start handing out marks for ambition, I want to establish exactly what has happened to employment in New Zealand, why it has happened, and what is in and out of our control.  
  
**How bad is unemployment in New Zealand?**  
According to Stats NZ, unemployment reached 5.6 per cent in the June 2026 quarter, the highest rate in 11 years. There were approximately 171,000 unemployed New Zealanders in the seasonally adjusted *Household Labour Force Survey*, up from 163,000 in March. In short, we have *substantially* more people looking for work than we did three years ago.

When the coalition government came into office, unemployment was around four per cent. In the June 2023 quarter, before the election, it had been 3.7 per cent. By June 2024 it had reached 4.7 per cent, by June 2025 it was 5.2 per cent, and a year later it stood at 5.6 per cent.

These figures conceal some of the more troubling aspects of the employment market, however, as the official unemployment rate only counts people who are actively seeking work and available to start. It does not fully capture people who have given up looking, those who would like more hours but cannot get them, or people who are technically employed but unable to find sufficient work to support themselves.

That is why economists also consider *“underutilisation”* which takes into account unused labour capacity. Stats NZ puts the national underutilisation rate at 13.8 per cent. It includes unemployed people, underemployed part-time workers, and certain people outside the labour force who are available for work or actively seeking it.

The situation for young people is particularly awful. The figures show that approximately 37 per cent of 15–24 year olds are underutilised. Youth unemployment is approaching 15 per cent nationally, and the regional differences are significant. In Hawke’s Bay and Gisborne, youth unemployment has reached 18.4 per cent, compared with 8.8 per cent in the final quarter of 2023\. There are communities in which nearly one in five young people who are participating in the labour force cannot find a job.  
  
**Whose fault is it?**  
To be fair to the coalition government we have to acknowledge that the dire unemployment stats during their term of government were not only as a result of their actions. There is a very convenient version of recent economic history being promoted by Labour in which New Zealand had a totally healthy employment market until Christopher Luxon arrived, whereupon the country’s economic fortunes deteriorated because National decided to sack everybody and stop building things. This is simply not true.

And to be fair to Labour, there is an equally convenient version preferred by some coalition supporters in which every economic difficulty facing New Zealand in 2026 is the direct consequence of Jacinda Ardern and Chris Hipkins. This too is not an intellectually serious explanation.

In the September 2023 *Pre-election Economic and Fiscal Updat*e, published while Labour was still in government, Treasury was already predicting unemployment would rise substantially. It forecast the rate would reach 4.8 per cent by June 2024 and peak at approximately 5.4 per cent in early 2025 before easing. By June 2026, it expected unemployment to have fallen to 4.8 per cent. So the economic deterioration we have experienced was substantially foreseen before the coalition even won the election. However, the fact that unemployment is now 5.6 per cent, rather than the 4.8 per cent predicted for this point, also means the current government cannot simply declare everything is proceeding exactly as expected.

The causes go for the most part back to the extraordinary economic interventions undertaken during Covid and, particularly, the inflationary aftermath. It is important to distinguish between the initial decision to support businesses and workers during lockdowns and the wider spending decisions Labour subsequently made. Most of us can agree that there was a legitimate economic argument for substantial emergency assistance when governments had effectively prohibited large parts of the economy from operating. Without that support, many otherwise viable businesses would have collapsed.

But as the two Covid-19 commissions showed, temporary emergency spending became part of a much wider expansion of government expenditure, while monetary stimulus and supply disruptions contributed to inflationary pressures. New Zealand was not unique in this respect and I acknowledge that governments and central banks around the developed world faced similar problems and often made similar mistakes to those made by our Labour government.

In any case, the resulting inflation required the Reserve Bank to raise interest rates aggressively and that was always likely to suppress demand, construction activity, investment and, eventually, employment. Monetary policy works with a delay, meaning the economic consequences of decisions made under one government frequently become most visible under its successor. Bad luck National, ACT, and New Zealand First.  
  
**But things are bad everywhere, right?**  
Well, yeah. Kind of. The OECD reported an average unemployment rate of 4.9 per cent in July 2026\. Australia’s Bureau of Statistics recorded 4.6 per cent in August, while Britain’s Office for National Statistics reported 4.9 per cent for May to July. All lower than our current unemployment rate. However, Canada’s seasonally adjusted unemployment rate was 6.4 per cent in August, so at least New Zealand is not the worst.

The Australian comparison is the one that should particularly concern us as the Aussies are sufficiently similar to us in culture, geography, and institutions that moving there is pretty easy, particularly for young people without children. It also offers higher wages in many occupations and a significantly larger employment market.  
  
**What is out of our control?**  
New Zealand is a small trading nation operating in a global economy that does not organise itself around our electoral timetable. We cannot control international demand for our exports, the economic performance of China or Australia, the price of oil, or the decisions of major foreign central banks. We cannot prevent wars or compel shipping companies to offer affordable freight rates. We are also considerably more exposed to some of these disruptions than larger economies because we depend so heavily on imports and international trade.

The conflict in the Middle East is a particularly obvious example. Disruption or threatened disruption to shipping through the Strait of Hormuz can raise global oil prices and shipping costs and New Zealand feels the effects. Rising fuel costs are a substantial increase in the cost of doing business for a lot of Kiwi businesses. Those costs are either absorbed through lower profit margins or passed on to customers. Neither outcome is particularly conducive to increased hiring.

Then there is artificial intelligence, which I suspect will fundamentally change the employment market over the next decade in ways that our politicians have barely begun to comprehend. We have that to look forward to.

Much of the public discussion about AI has focused on its spectacular capabilities and the possibility of replacing entire professions. But the immediate threat to employment may be more prosaic. Businesses are discovering that technology can perform increasingly sophisticated administrative, analytical, customer service, and content production tasks, and these happen to include many of the activities traditionally assigned to junior employees.

Of course, there is a possibility that AI will create new industries and occupations, just as previous technological revolutions have done. It may also allow small New Zealand businesses to compete internationally in ways that were previously impossible. I am certainly not advocating that we attempt to hold back the AI tide.

But we should recognise that the transition will probably be painful and that the new jobs will not necessarily appear in the same places, require the same skills, or be available to the same people as those being displaced. Any party offering a serious long term employment policy should be thinking about the relationship between technology, education, productivity, and the early years of people’s working lives. Simply promising more jobs without considering how the nature of work is changing is rather inadequate at this point.  
  
**The Greens want to guarantee every young person a job. With our money, obviously.**  
Of all the parties campaigning on jobs, the Greens have produced the most ambitious programme and, rather predictably, the one involving the greatest expansion of government responsibility for employment. Their newly announced plan proposes nearly $5.9 billion in additional expenditure over four years which it claims will produce 64,000 more jobs than Treasury’s existing forecast of approximately 220,000 for a total employment growth of around 284,000.

Their package includes changes to the government’s *Investment Boost* tax incentive, fellowships for researchers and technical specialists, more support for commercialising research, expanded science funding, and greater use of government procurement to support New Zealand businesses. The Greens also want research and development expenditure to reach three per cent of GDP, compared with approximately 1.5 per cent currently. These are not inherently ridiculous objectives in the slightest. New Zealand’s poor productivity is a problem with a capital P, and there is a good argument for improving the relationship between scientific research, innovation, and commercially successful businesses.

However, the Greens are determined to ensure that investment takes place in accordance with political priorities established by the state. A state *they* control. That’s why their proposed replacement or restructuring of *Investment Boost* is much much more prescriptive and directs incentives towards activities meeting government-determined industry, decarbonisation, and employment criteria.

This would likely mean businesses would shift to make decisions based on satisfying political conditions rather than responding to consumer demand or commercial opportunity. Good things don’t tend to come from governments picking winners and attempting to override market demand.

There is also the question of whether the 64,000 additional jobs they are claiming are genuinely attributable to the policies they are proposing. Producing a model that predicts employment growth after an injection of public money is not the same as demonstrating that those jobs would never otherwise have existed. Public expenditure has opportunity costs, particularly when it must be financed through borrowing or taxation, so money directed towards politically preferred industries is money unavailable for investment or spending elsewhere.The Greens need to show that the economic benefits will exceed the cost, that government spending won't simply displace private investment, and that the jobs will survive once the subsidies disappear.

Their claims about additional employment should also be understood as modelled estimates, not guaranteed outcomes. Someone should inform our media of the difference.

![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!rg7D!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6c220f86-a449-4a41-b280-57eb96ffafa2_1600x1364.png)

The Greens’ separate *Youth Jobs Guarantee* is even more revealing of the party’s philosophy. The programme promises every 16–24 year old who has been out of work for six months a pathway into locally based job or training. It would build on the *Mayors Taskforce for Jobs* and the previous Labour government’s *Jobs for Nature* programme, funding work through councils, iwi, community organisations, businesses, and the public sector.

Alarm bells should be ringing given *Jobs for Nature* cost taxpayers nearly $1.2 billion and, according to the government, approximately $77 for every hour of work generated. The programme was conceived during Covid when Treasury feared unemployment could reach as high as 26 per cent, a catastrophe that thankfully never materialised. As the economic justification weakened, the programme shifted its emphasis towards environmental outcomes, without consistently updating its contractual arrangements. Evaluators identified inconsistent reporting, inadequate planning for what would happen when the funding ran out, and insufficiently structured pathways into recognised qualifications. It operated through 25 funding streams across five government agencies, creating exactly the sort of bureaucratic complexity one might expect from a billion-dollar government employment scheme.

The *Mayors Taskforce for Jobs* is an initiative established in 2000 that works through local councils to help young people into employment, particularly in rural and provincial areas. It provides practical support such as driver licensing, training, and assistance connecting jobseekers with employers. Unlike *Jobs for Nature*, which funded temporary positions directly, the taskforce primarily helps young people find employment with existing businesses. The Greens estimate that scaling up the initiative through all 67 councils would place 32,000 young people into local employment.

The broader youth programme is estimated in reporting to cost between $4.7 billion and $4.9 billion over four years. Their own policy document lists annual indicative costs rising from $604 million in 2027/28 to $1.631 billion in 2030/31\. Added together, those annual figures amount to approximately $4.86 billion.

I want to give the Greens some credit before explaining why I find their proposal unfortunately unworkable. They are correct that leaving young people unemployed for prolonged periods has serious consequences. They are also correct that there is plenty of useful work to be done in New Zealand. Councils have maintenance backlogs, community services face staffing pressures, and there are worthwhile conservation and infrastructure projects that could provide opportunities for young workers to acquire skills and experience.

Government-funded programmes *can* create temporary employment and produce environmental work. However, it does not establish that expanding the model indefinitely is the most cost effective, or sustainable, way of improving permanent employment outcomes.

I have no objection to helping young people who genuinely struggle to find employment. But I am less enthusiastic about creating an expectation that whenever the private economy cannot provide somebody with a job, the government must manufacture one.

The Greens’ policy indicates that they would provide funding principally for roles in central or local government and non-profit organisations, while private businesses would be supported through placement arrangements and other assistance. Public and non-profit sectors generally depend, directly or indirectly, on revenue generated elsewhere in the economy, so expanding taxpayer-funded employment is not the same thing as increasing the capacity of the productive economy to sustain employment.

Naturally, the eye-watering cost of the Greens’ policy is a concern. The party proposes spending approximately $4.86 billion over four years, with its own indicative annual costs rising to more than $1.6 billion by 2030/31\. Yet there is insufficient information about how many genuinely additional jobs the programme would create, how long those positions would last, or what proportion of participants would subsequently secure employment without continuing government assistance. Those are rather important details when you are asking taxpayers to commit nearly $5 billion to an employment scheme.

This is all being proposed alongside an additional nearly $6 billion for their economic development package, which is itself only part of an enormous Green spending programme. According to the Taxpayers’ Union’s *Bribe-O-Meter,* the Greens have already announced an estimated $242.28 billion in spending commitments as at 4 October 2026, equivalent to approximately $116,931 per New Zealand household before this latest jobs announcement or to around 20 months of the Government’s entire annual budget. Their commitments are more than seven times Labour’s $33.17 billion in announced spending, and over 60 times National’s $3.84 billion

I appreciate that the Greens propose substantial new taxation to fund their ambitions. But transferring resources through the state does not abolish the economic cost of obtaining them. At some point, the money has to come from households, businesses, borrowing, or a combination of all three.

There is also a philosophical concern with this direction of travel. The Greens increasingly approach the economy as something that government should organise, direct, own... *dictate*. History provides us with some rather spectacular warnings about putting that philosophy into action.

Communist states have often claimed impressive employment figures because the government controlled the allocation of labour. But guaranteeing that everybody had an assigned job did not guarantee that their work was productive, that resources were being allocated sensibly or fairly, or that the economy was capable of producing the goods and services people actually wanted.

And for the younger voters who find the idea of guaranteed employment appealing, it is worth remembering that the jobs allocated by communist states were not necessarily jobs people wanted to do, were suited to, or had any meaningful choice in. You could find yourself assigned to a factory, a collective farm, or some other dreary occupation determined by the state’s economic priorities rather than your own ambitions. **The supposed security of guaranteed employment under communism comes at the expense of considerable personal and economic freedom.**

Now, I am not suggesting that Chlöe Swarbrick’s youth employment programme is equivalent to the Soviet command economy. But it certainly has some commonalities that suggest one might be downstream of the other.

The Greens have correctly identified a serious problem. Unfortunately, their preferred answer seems to be that the state should assume ever greater responsibility for solving it, regardless of the fiscal cost or the risks of displacing activity that might otherwise have occurred privately. In addition, I remain thoroughly unconvinced that handing Chlöe Swarbrick control over New Zealand’s economy is our most promising route to prosperity.  
  
**Labour wants to put people back to work. But can it pay for its promises?**  
Chris Hipkins has adopted *Jobs, Health, Homes* as a defining message, and the emphasis is smart as the deterioration of the employment market provides Labour with one of its strongest opportunities to challenge National’s economic competence. Never mind the hand he had in it.

Unlike the Greens, Labour has largely concentrated on specific areas of employment rather than proposing that the government become the employer of last resort. Its most prominent policy commitments involve reviving construction, expanding apprenticeship assistance, and guaranteeing employment for nursing graduates.

There is quite a lot in Labour’s proposals that I consider sensible, but there are also some significant holes in their account of how the country arrived at this point and how their promises would be funded.

For example, Labour claims approximately 20,000 construction jobs have been lost over the past three years and has eagerly attributed the damage to the coalition’s decisions to cancel, pause, or reconsider major projects. They are correct that when a government changes direction or delays work, the resulting uncertainty can be devastating. However, Labour is rather conveniently neglecting the collapse in residential construction activity, which has been heavily affected by high interest rates, increased building costs, and weak demand. These problems were developing well before the coalition took office.

Nor is the answer simply to resume spending public money on every project Labour previously supported. Governments have to distinguish between infrastructure investment with strong economic returns and projects with costs that have escalated beyond justification.

Labour’s apprenticeship policy is more compelling. It proposes extending *Apprenticeship Boost* employer payments from one year to two years, retaining payments of $500 a month, and expanding eligibility into areas including road construction, water and sanitary engineering, personal services, sales and marketing, and sports and recreation. It would also provide new apprentices with a $1,000 grant towards tools and other start-up expenses, alongside a pilot mentoring programme. The policy would cost an average of $56.5 million annually over four years, with costs increasing as the programme expands.

There is an economic argument behind this. Taking on an apprentice involves costs beyond their wages because employers must supervise and train inexperienced workers. That can make the decision to employ an apprentice considerably less appealing. A subsidy may therefore encourage an employer to take somebody on who would otherwise have been considered too expensive or risky. Supporting people to obtain recognised qualifications also offers a more durable benefit than simply placing them in temporary employment.

Of course, a subsidy cannot persuade an employer to take on an apprentice if they cannot find enough work to keep their existing staff occupied. Labour’s policy may help businesses expand their workforce once demand recovers, but it is not going to manufacture that demand in the meantime.

Labour’s nursing graduate guarantee presents a more complicated picture. Chris Hipkins has promised that eligible nurses graduating from New Zealand institutions will be offered employment in the public health system, with roles of at least 0.8 full time equivalent. The policy would operate through existing graduate recruitment pathways and is expected to cover approximately 2,400 graduates annually, although that does not mean 2,400 additional positions would be created every year.

The party estimates the guarantee will cost $525 million over four years and result in approximately 350 additional nursing roles over that period. It also proposes increasing recruitment assistance for primary care nurses, with larger subsidies for rural practices.

Again, the problem identified is real. We have a health system in which nurses and patients complain about inadequate staffing, while some newly qualified nurses struggle to secure employment and so leave for Australia. However, nursing shortages can be concentrated in particular specialties, geographic areas, and levels of experience. A graduate nurse is not immediately interchangeable with an experienced emergency department or intensive care nurse. Employing graduates also requires supervision, clinical support, and appropriate training. So while Labour’s proposal could certainly help address the longer term workforce pipeline, it won’t instantly resolve every shortage simply by producing employment agreements.

And it comes at quite a price. Labour says the $525 million will come from health cost-pressure funding, which is money provided to help the health system absorb rising costs associated with wages, inflation, and increasing demand. Current Health Minister Simeon Brown has argued that the funding is already needed to meet existing commitments and this is worth taking seriously. Money allocated to health cost pressures is not a discretionary pot waiting for politicians to assign it to an election promise.

The same tensions appear in Labour’s wider economic programme. Their *Small Business Action Plan* includes requiring large companies to pay smaller suppliers more promptly, increasing the compulsory GST registration threshold to $80,000, and allowing eligible businesses to immediately deduct the cost of certain equipment purchases up to $10,000\. Practical ideas aimed at improving cash flow and reducing compliance burdens, particularly for smaller operators. The difficulty is that Labour has simultaneously committed to repealing or redirecting National’s *Investment Boost*, which provides a tax incentive for businesses investing in productive assets.

Treasury estimated that *Investment Boost* could increase GDP by up to 0.5 per cent over five years. Labour needs to explain why its narrower arrangements would generate better economic outcomes than the broader incentive they would replace. It cannot simply assume that spending less on one tax incentive and more on politically preferred programmes will improve employment.

There is also a problem with the timing of Labour’s proposals. Some of its apprenticeship measures would not take full effect until 2028 and workforce development takes time to produce qualified employees. So even if they are proposing worthwhile long term policies, they are not an immediate answer to someone who has been unemployed for six months.  
  
**National is promising 220,000 jobs. How many would happen anyway?**  
National has chosen a rather impressive headline number for its employment pitch, promising 220,000 jobs by 2030\. It is totally doable. Probably because Treasury is already forecasting exactly that level of employment growth over the coming four years anyway.

There is nothing inherently wrong with a governing party campaigning on its economic forecasts. Governments, after all, do influence the conditions in which employment grows, and a forecast recovery may well depend in part on their policies. But it is a bit cute to pass it off as if National has demonstrated its policies will independently create that number.

The more relevant question is whether National’s policies (or the wider coalition’s policies) are likely to make our employment recovery stronger, faster, and more sustainable than it would otherwise have been and there are actually reasons to think some of them could. The government has sought to restore fiscal discipline, reduce regulatory burdens, improve investment incentives, and create conditions in which businesses can expand. National’s *Investment Boost* scheme is a meaningful attempt to address New Zealand’s longstanding problem of underinvestment in productive capital and I hope it isn’t murdered by Labour or maimed by the Greens.

The coalition government has also achieved changes to planning and infrastructure legislation, intended to make development easier and provide greater certainty for investment. These are generally sensible priorities and given enough time will make it easier to build, invest, operate a business, and employ people, contributing to the conditions required for employment growth.

On the whole, National (and the coalition) has the right broad economic philosophy for improvement, but given the difficult economic conditions they inherited they have not yet had the time to prove the efficacy of their policies. But while they are entitled to these caveats, I will not let them get away that easy because National is asking voters to place considerable faith in an acceleration that has not yet borne any fruit.

That faith is harder to come by given some of National’s other unfulfilled ambitions. Consider its promise to rein in the bloated public service. According to the Public Service Commission, there were 63,117 full time equivalent public servants in June 2023, rising to 65,699 by December that year. After considerable public discussion about government cutbacks, actual redundancies, and much political outrage, the figure was 64,535 in March 2026\. Nicola Willis has now committed to reducing the workforce to 55,000 by mid-2029.

Of course, the problem of unemployment and the problem of the bloated public service have solutions that are necessarily mutually incompatible. Shrinking the size of the bureaucracy would mean adding to the number of unemployed in the short term. That doesn’t mean National should preserve unnecessary jobs, but it does necessitate a coherent strategy for managing the economic transition, particularly in regions heavily exposed to public sector employment.

But as I say, the coalition did not actually shrink the bureaucracy so this should all be redundant. However, one of the biggest problems that National has had for the past three years has been one of narrative. New Zealanders think that they have been cutting jobs, even if they haven’t. And they have *appeared* reluctant to acknowledge the human costs of their fiscal decisions even though those very costs were probably the things keeping them up at night.

National deserves credit for recognising that sustainable employment depends upon productive businesses rather than an indefinitely expanding public sector, but also deserves every bit of grief they receive for presenting a forecast 220,000 job recovery as though the figure is its own.  
  
**ACT thinks the problem starts with the cost of employing people**  
Unsurprisingly, ACT approaches unemployment from almost the opposite direction to the Greens. Where the Greens see a shortage of jobs as a justification for government to create them, ACT reckons that the state has made it unnecessarily expensive and difficult for businesses to employ people and needs to get out of the way.

The party’s wider programme focuses on reducing regulation, restraining government expenditure, lowering the tax burden, and improving incentives for private investment. Among its most unpopular employment-related proposals is freezing minimum wage increases for three years. Not only has the left bloc screamed bloody murder about this, so has New Zealand First.

But ACT says they are not proposing it out of cruelty or heartlessness. They reason that when the cost of employing somebody rises, businesses have to determine whether employing each worker justifies the expense. A minimum wage that rises too fast can result in reducing hours, employing fewer people, increasing prices, or investing in labour-saving technology. The counter is that freezing the minimum wage while living costs rise also reduces the real earnings of those already receiving it.

ACT’s approach is most persuasive as part of a wider effort to make business and employment easier. Their weakness is that deregulation and wage restraint do not necessarily produce employment opportunities in an economy suffering from weak demand. A business struggling to attract customers is unlikely to hire more staff simply because the minimum wage has stopped increasing.

While ACT understands that ultimately, businesses must be able to afford the people they employ, they have offered little by way of an immediate response to the young people already locked out of the employment market right now.  
  
**New Zealand First wants full employment back on the agenda**  
Winston Peters has introduced a rather interesting philosophical distinction into the election debate by arguing that New Zealand should again pursue full employment as an explicit economic objective. New Zealand First have also proposed restoring employment to the Reserve Bank’s mandate, which would reverse their own coalition’s decision to return the bank to focus on price stability.

There is an argument for considering employment alongside inflation when setting monetary policy. Several major central banks operate with mandates that include employment considerations, and there is a legitimate debate about the balance between price stability and economic activity. However, the Reserve Bank cannot directly create productive jobs. Restoring a dual mandate would not automatically lower unemployment, particularly when inflation is being driven so significantly by international fuel prices or supply disruptions.

The danger in a dual mandate, and the reason the coalition removed it, is that politicians begin treating monetary policy as an instrument for maintaining artificially high demand, tolerating inflation in the hope that employment will improve. New Zealand has experienced enough of the consequences of inflation to warrant considerable caution about that approach.

That said, New Zealand First’s wider economic policies are more substantial than the Reserve Bank proposal alone. They recently announced a proposal to reduce company tax to 20 per cent (from 28 per cent) for qualifying smaller businesses with turnover below $30 million and this is particularly relevant to employment. Lower company tax would leave businesses with more retained earnings to invest, expand, and potentially employ additional workers.

New Zealand First have also proposed replacing the Accredited Employer Work Visa with a shortage-led Skilled Work Visa, arguing that immigration settings should better reflect genuine workforce needs and reduce exploitation. This is a much more direct policy intended to to address legitimate concerns about immigration policy being used to supply labour while insufficient attention is paid to the wages, training, and employment prospects of New Zealanders. However, they acknowledge that some industries genuinely require overseas workers and have left room for that.  
  
**Opportunity has an economic policy. Is it a jobs policy?**  
The Opportunity Party has produced an ambitious economic development programme under the banner of its ($1.33 billion annual) *Breakthrough Economy* policy. Its diagnosis is familiar, and correct. New Zealand suffers from weak productivity, insufficient investment in research and development, and a tendency to direct capital towards established assets rather than innovative businesses. They have pro-business policies including increased science funding, tax credits for technology adoption, stronger commercialisation pathways, support for start-ups, and changes intended to make polytechnics more closely connected to the needs of regional businesses.

Additionally, Opportunity’s *Citizen’s Income* is intended to give people greater financial security while retraining, changing careers or starting businesses, while its proposals for polytechnics, small business support and technology investment could strengthen the economy’s capacity to create higher-skilled employment. But these are largely long term structural reforms and I am fundamentally opposed to the UBI. But that is another essay entirely.

Opportunity’s proposals offer worthwhile improvements to New Zealand’s long term productive capacity. Indeed, some are more coherent than those offered by parties with considerably more parliamentary experience. However, Opportunity’s policy platform appears to largely assume employment will improve as a consequence of higher productivity and innovation, but lacks any immediate solutions to our unemployment problem.  
  
**Te Pāti Māori: Māori economic development, but where is the unemployment strategy?**  
Te Pāti Māori has some policies that could generate employment, although its approach is overwhelmingly focused on Māori-specific economic development rather than the broader unemployment crisis. The party proposes a $1 billion Energy Sovereignty Fund, developing a Māori energy workforce, establishing Māori-led investment institutions, supporting Māori businesses and creative industries, and increasing housing construction.

There are some potentially worthwhile initiatives here, particularly those aimed at developing businesses. However, the party has not provided any quantified improvement objectives or a clear explanation of how its proposals would reduce unemployment across the wider economy. The absence of detail is particularly concerning given the disproportionate employment difficulties facing young Māori that this party is never shy of talking about.  
  
**So who actually has the better answer?**  
I began looking at these policies hoping to find that at least one party had assembled a genuinely convincing response to New Zealand’s employment problem. What I predictably found instead was a rather definitive division between parties that are concentrating on creating the conditions for businesses to employ more people and those that want government to take greater responsibility for providing employment itself.

But a government cannot regulate and subsidise its way to prosperity. Neither can it assume that removing obstacles to private investment will immediately solve unemployment among young people who are already struggling to enter the workforce.

There are situations in which carefully targeted public intervention makes sense, particularly in apprenticeships, vocational training, and helping people who face substantial barriers to employment. There are also circumstances in which the most useful thing a government can do is stop imposing unnecessary costs and uncertainty on the people who might otherwise employ them.

The evidence does not persuade me that the Greens’ multibillion-dollar employment guarantee represents a credible or fiscally responsible response. They have correctly diagnosed the seriousness of youth unemployment but have proposed a solution that places extraordinary (and undue) faith in the state’s ability to organise productive work, alongside a wider spending programme whose scale should alarm anybody concerned about our long term economic stability.

There are sensible ideas scattered across the political spectrum, although none of the parties have managed to put together a full package. I am more persuaded by policies that make it easier for businesses to invest, expand and employ people, alongside targeted support for training and those struggling to enter the workforce. But I am wary of politicians who confuse increasing government expenditure with improving economic outcomes, and equally wary of those who believe that announcing the right economic reforms is sufficient evidence that those reforms are working.

The current coalition probably has the better understanding of what drives sustainable employment in the private economy, but after three years in government it has precious little improvement in the unemployment figures to show for it. Labour has some worthwhile proposals but cannot escape its contribution to the economic circumstances we are now experiencing. And the Greens’ extraordinary spending ambitions raise considerably more questions about the long term sustainability of their employment promises than they answer.

But what frustrates me about this election’s discussion of jobs is how little attention is being paid to the distinction between employing somebody and creating the economic conditions in which their employment can be sustained. We are being offered enormous spending commitments, promises of government-guaranteed positions, and forecasts of jobs that may appear regardless of who occupies the Treasury benches. Yet the underlying problem remains that New Zealand is an expensive place to operate a business, we have invested poorly in productivity for decades, and our economy is not generating opportunities quickly enough for the people who want them.

And perhaps that is the judgement our politicians deserve. After three years of deteriorating employment conditions, the governing parties are asking voters to trust that the recovery is coming, while Labour is asking them to forget the economic circumstances in which the deterioration began. The Greens are promising to spend billions employing people directly, but have not adequately demonstrated what happens when the money runs out. Meanwhile, young New Zealanders who have done everything we asked of them deserve something more convincing than another round of ambitious numbers from politicians whose own employment is rather more secure than theirs. Well, for three years after the election at least.

This article was originally published by [Thought Crimes](https://aniobrien.substack.com/p/everybodys-promising-jobs).