Paula Bennett

By Maggie Tait of NZPA

Wellington, Nov 24 NZPA - The Government says it increased places on its Job Ops scheme, even though existing spaces have not yet been filled, because it is expecting high demand over the summer.

Today Social Development Minister Paula Bennett said an additional 2000 places on the scheme, bringing the total to 6000, aimed at getting young people into work would be funded at a cost of about $8.9 million.

The scheme offers a $5000 wage subsidy over six months to help low-skilled young people find work.

The government offers another 3000 places under its Community Max scheme where it pays the minimum wage for work on approved community projects for six months plus a $1250 training payment paid to the community group.

Under questioning from Labour deputy leader Annette King in Parliament today Ms Bennett said 1847 positions had been filled under Job Ops and 981 under Community Max.

Ms King was unimpressed: "Why does she continue to say that since Job Ops and Community Max were launched in August the programmes alone have created more than 4000 employment opportunities when barely half of that number of positions have been filled, and doesn't this sort of disingenuous representation of statistics belittle the real impact that unemployment is having on our young people?"

Ms Bennett said take-up was increasing rapidly.

"We anticipate that all the places will have been filled by early next year. Employers are stepping up and giving thousands of young people opportunities to get work experience and skills that wouldn't have been available otherwise in the recession."

Youth unemployment had gone up by 8000 people in seven months but Ms Bennett said in recent weeks that had started to improve. Of the 1700 people who moved from the unemployment benefit into jobs over the past seven weeks, 67 percent were young people.

Labour MP Jacinda Ardern said Ms Bennett relied too much on numbers on the benefit when many youth were not eligible for benefits.

Ms Bennett said 19,500 were on the youth unemployment benefit. She said wider unemployment figures included youth that were only looking for part time work.

Earlier today Ms Bennett said while there had been some improvement in figures for young unemployed this summer would be a tough one.

Over 160,000 students had registered with Student Job Search, which was a 60 percent increase on the same time last year.

Asked this morning if the Job Ops scheme would take work off students Mr Key disagreed. He said the scheme was for six months not the few weeks students were available and Ms Bennett said weekly checks with employers and youth showed the jobs were durable.

A nearly $1m campaign would be run to target businesses and individuals and help connect people with students.

While there was some positive move in unemployment figures -- Mr Key yesterday said the number of people signing up for the dole has fallen for the seventh successive week and the total stood at 59,028 last week.

That figure was about 23,000 lower than the Treasury's worst-case scenario and better than any of its projections, but the government did not expect the trend to continue.

School leavers and those finishing tertiary study would be added to the pool.

`This is not a trend that is going to continue forever but we've got confidence we can turn it around again next year," Ms Bennett said.

Council of Trade Unions secretary Peter Conway welcomed the Job Ops increase but called on the government to resist further cuts in public service jobs and invest more in skills training to prevent the 150,000 unemployment figure further rising.