Jobs (For The Boys) Summit

Reporting and trumping that the Jobs Summit cost just $65,000 to host shows how out of touch people are with the true cost of a day off work for 200 attendees.

If you calculate the lost productivity and add in the time charges and travel costs of 200 attendees in that room for a day you are looking at I would imagine several million dollars that John Key has spent getting 20 ideas that in reality a National Party caucus meeting and his hundreds of public sector advisors should have been able to come up with.

Everyone attending the Summit appears to be under Chatham House rules, including the most common Chatham House rule that applies in every Boys Club across the world, "thou must not say anything that undermines what we did in private". Attendees including journalists appear to have been brainwashed with positivity chemicals emitting from the disposable cardboard lunch boxes.

According to Granny Herald the 3 big items from the Jobs (for the boys) Summit were:

A nine-day working fortnight, an investment fund worth hundreds of millions of dollars and - the surprise item - a cycleway the length of New Zealand.

The only way to create employment is not for Government to do it with an enlarged public sector, or subsidise private sector jobs that there is no demand for presently, but for sustained periods of economic growth. This participant needed to be taken out the back and shot for this statement:

"A job summit is not a general economic summit. It's not about productivity and growth. It's about retaining and growing employment. So if it is to be jobs summit, then it's all about the labour market and this includes thinking about whether it has been harmed by successive court and government decisions. A rigid labour market is a sure-fire way to create unemployment."

Without productivity and growth there can be no growth in employment can there?

Most of the ideas relating to economic growth were based around getting Government out of the lives of businesspeople (9,10,11,13,14). You hardly needed a Summit to come to those conclusions.

It is not surprising that when you invite pigs to a trough, they attempt to drink at it. If you go through the 20, some very vague recommendations put out by attendees and the attendees core businesses you can see a direct correlation between the attendees and their niche areas of core business. Even the smoldering stench of private consulting firms was evident, waiting to pounce on any funds they could possibly get their snouts into and rub up the legs of John Key and his staff in attendance.

It's all mostly very underwhelming. I've highlighted the ideas I think are good and will endeavour as time permits to write about why I think the others are not.

1. Retain and upskill with a nine day fortnight.
2. Intra-national migration to remove barriers between employers and seasonal workers.
3. Keeping people in education and creating jobs through education and training.
4. Improving matching of supply and demand for training
5. Redundancy and transition support for people who lose their jobs.
6. Enhance the use of Maori iwi assets.
7. Ensure government services reach Maori effectively
8. Urgently develop and implement new sources of bond funding
9. Reduce regulatory compliance costs and impediments
10. A return to big project fast track.
11. A freeze on rule making by government agencies and regulators
12. Boosting tourist traffic funding
13. Accelerate energy, environmental and water initiatives for employment and productivity improvements
14. Streamline regulatory approval processes for major projects
15. Access to working capital delivered via an extension of the Export Credit Office
16. Level the playing field to New Zealand firms for local and central government procurement
17. Super-charge the debt market by streamlining reporting and disclosure requirements.
18. Develop a government/bank equity investment fund
19. Commitment by banks to provide capital to New Zealand firms.
20. Banks to significantly invest in financial literacy

But wait there is more! Regional Summits are coming to a town near you. Oh the joy, if this is what the supposed 200 leaders of the country can come up with then just imagine the crappy moon-bat ideas that will emerge from the provinces.

The Ministry of Social Development are at least being kept busy. The Summit is keeping them gainfully employed.