National ‘committed to full employment’

Press, 14 September 1988, Page 7

National ‘committed to full employment’

By

OLIVER RIDDELL

in Wellington

The National Party is committed to a policy of full employment, according to its spokesman on employment, Mr Winston Peters.

He told the Hutt Valley Chamber of Commerce yesterday that National’s employment policies for the 1990 election had nearly been completed. He disputed the claims by the Labour Government and the Treasury that job creation schemes were expensive. There had been $llOO million budgeted for the unemployment benefit this year, and it would be harder for job creation schemes to get more expensive than that.

Added to that were the economic costs of unemployment in the police and justice budgets, social welfare expenditure, health and housing expenditure, and even local government revenue, that had to increase to compensate for the pressure of unemployment. Mr Peters said the Government also overlooked the economic costs of letting human capital idly rust with work habits and skills running to ruin. The National Party’s employment policies

would give precedence to: • Quality tertiary training programmes that were aimed at providing young people, not just with the skills, but with the worktraining ethic they would require throughout their working life; @ A programme aimed at workers involved in industry that allowed them to improve their skills and rewarded them for productivity gains and initiative; ® Better links between schools, training and work

to ensure that young people were both aware of and matched to skills shortages and vacancies; • Community based job creation programmes that were targeted to regions of special need, and that developed work experience and skills for those on them; @ A more relevant relationship between welfare and incentives to work; ® A multi-departmental approach to career guidance and counselling to ensure that the workplace

and educational bodies had a more integrated structure and relationship; ® A refusal to allow long-term unemployment to bright people, by providing a range of work/training options for everyone unemployed longer than six months; and ® Economic policies that provided a sustainable period of business expansion to accommodate the right of every New Zealander to work in their own country.