Job hunters stranded

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33816, 12 April 1975, Page 16

Job hunters stranded

(A’ew Zealand Press Association) KAITAIA, April 11. Two hundred disappointed and angry people, including a few women and children, ■were tonight sleeping at the Ahipara marae, 10 miles from Kaitaia. after coming in buses and cars from Auckland to fill bush jobs which apparently do not exist.

Recent newspaper advertisements offered jobs and houses, and applicants from as far away as Invercargill were engaged, with wages as high as $4.50 an hour for top bushmen.

A spokesman for a firm, called Jomax Consolidated, is said to have stated that houses would have been provided near Kaitaia and that 8500 acres of bush would be felled and the land turned into farms. However, no-one in the district knows of any such bush. The workers set off this morning from Auckland in four buses and cars, but a promised meal was not provided in Whangarei, and no-one was waiting for them at Kaitaia.

They milled angrily until Maoris offered them accommodation.

There was little food at the marae, but the people took a collection among themselves, and bread and vegetables were bought in Kaitaia at 9 p.m.

The party will probably return to Auckland tomorrow.

Representatives of Jomax Consolidated tonight left the Northcote Motel, on the Auckland North Shore, from which they had been working.

The owners of the motel say the representatives left no forwarding address. Takapuna detectives are looking into the affair.