vivian Hutchinson is the editor of The Jobs Letter, a trustee of The Jobs Research Trust, and Community Adviser to the Mayors Taskforce for Jobs. This paper is based on his keynote speech to The Spirit of Youth : Pu Maia Rangatahi — Youth in Local Government Conference, held in Rotorua 21-23 May 2002.

“ The in-born creativity of all people is no mean or accidental thing. Neglect it, and it becomes an inner source of poison. On the other hand, nothing can stop the flowering of a society that manages to give free rein to the creativity of all its people ...”
— Fritz Schumacher, author of Good Work (1979)

I’m here to support the Mayors Taskforce for Jobs and their immediate goal that, by 2005, no young person under the age of 25 will be out of work and training in our communities. This goal is important to me because I don’t want to live in a New Zealand that has no use for a large number of its young people.

The Mayors Taskforce for Jobs has worked closely with the Rotorua District Council in staging this event, and has organised the “employment” stream of workshops which will be held over the next two days. So it is particularly heartening to see so many young people at this meeting, and to see so many Mayors and Councillors from around New Zealand turning up to support the “Spirit of Youth” theme of this conference.

The employment situation in New Zealand has seen a significant improvement under the Labour/Alliance government. The latest figures tell us that over 100,000 new jobs have been created in the last two years, and the labour force participation rate is the highest it has been since records began in 1985. There are fewer long-term unemployed than there were two years ago. There has also been strong growth in jobs for Maori and Pacific Island people. This is all good news for any government in an election year.

We had a meeting of the Taskforce for Jobs here yesterday and many of the Mayors were reporting boom times in their regions. But one of them also made the comment: “If this is the best it gets ... then we certainly need to ‘raise our game’”.

The fact is that for all the good news on jobs ... we are still not solving unemployment, and we have a long way to go in addressing the deeper layers of this issue. There are still too many people out of work ... and too many of them are young people who have never really started on the journey to livelihood.

The figures: There are 188,000 New Zealanders — or one in eleven — that are out of work and want a job. In addition to this, there are over 100,000 part-time workers who tell us they would like more paid work and are regarded as ‘underemployed’.

Young people carry a disproportionate burden of unemployment. Despite the 15-25 age group making up about 20% of the working age population, they make up 40% of the unemployed. If you are under 25 years of age, you have a one in eight chance of being out of work.

This is not just a tragedy for these young people and their families. It represents a very real ‘waste’ of these young lives — and a waste of the tremendous investment this country has already made in them through our education system.

2.

The membership of the Taskforce for Jobs has been growing throughout this year and over half the Mayors in the country have now signed up to this initiative. For the Mayors, this has never happened before on a social issue.

The Taskforce has been able to attract many significant partnerships to its purpose. These partnerships have included not only government Ministers such as Steve Maharey and Jim Anderton, but also Local Government NZ, the Department of Work and Income, and the Community Employment Group. The Taskforce has also been working closely with the NZ Business Council for Sustainable Development which includes major local companies such as The Warehouse and Fonterra.

Our communities are based on livelihood. Our ability to create whole and healthy communities is underpinned by our ability to make a living. Most of the people involved in this Taskforce recognise that when livelihood disappears from our families and our neighbourhoods ... then the cohesion of our communities starts to crumble. When jobs disappear, we start to see all the social problems that come packaged with poverty.

This is why so many Mayors have joined this Taskforce. They recognise that ensuring good work and income in their communities is a cornerstone of their leadership and governance roles as Mayors. They also recognise that one of the most important legacies that they can leave their communities is one of ensuring a greater resilience of livelihood amidst these changing economic times.

The Mayors Taskforce for Jobs offers an important leadership element in developing the capacity to deliver solutions that make sense locally. It can also work with government in inspiring the co-operation, collaboration and co-ordination of all local resources towards ending unemployment in our communities.

3.

Healthy communities are not just based on livelihood. They are also based on a spirit of inclusion.

This isn’t as easy as it sounds ... communities and economies can also organise themselves in ways that actively encourage the exclusion of whole groups of people.

I find it interesting that the popular “reality” TV programmes such as “Survivor” or “Big Brother” or “The Weakest Link” all include a ritualized form of exclusion as part of the drama of the show. They turn exclusion into a spectator sport. They play upon that shadowy part of our humanity that is constantly dividing the world into “winners” and “losers”.

The acceptance in our communities of the large numbers of unemployed people is, in part, based on this widely-held notion that it is somehow natural to have this system of “winners” and “losers”. It’s the sport of life. We even blame the “losers” for their predicament by calling them “useless” or pointing to their “attitude” problems.

But the fact that we have 40% of our unemployed coming from one particular age group suggests to me that something else is happening. It tells me that a process of social exclusion is taking place. This isn’t about “winners” and “losers”. This is about governance choices and our inability to foster a whole range of opportunities that should be available for these young people.

If we don’t start to address the issue of livelihood amongst our young people, then we already know that this group will display a whole combination of linked problems. It might start with unemployment, poor skills and low incomes ... but then it leads to poor housing, bad health and high crime neighborhoods. And once these young people get into relationships and start their own families ... we see a continuing cycle of struggle and breakdown.

Social exclusion is a systemic problem. It is best solved by thinking about the systems of support that surround individuals, their families and their communities.

The trouble is we are surrounded by government departments and their local contractors who only know how to address each bit of the problem separately — the “whole of government” does not address the “whole of the person”.

4.

“Inclusion” is one of the major programme streams in this conference.

Social inclusion could be defined as our capacity and willingness to keep all groups within reach of what we expect as a society.

In governance terms, social inclusion is about being prepared to make the commitments and investments necessary to ensure all people are within reach of our common aspirations.

Livelihood is one such basic common aspiration. And our communities cannot afford to relegate this basic human right to a marketplace of “winners” and “losers”.

Young people have been experiencing a profound loss of livelihood over the last 15 years. In 1999, when Laila Harre took up her job as Minister of Youth Affairs she was given a briefing paper from her Ministry.

That paper showed that a greater proportion of young people today live in low income households. It also told us that in the decade 1986-1996, the median annual income of 15-25 year olds fell from $14,700 to $8,100 — a drop of nearly 45%!

The latest 2001 Census figure shows little change: the median annual income for this age group has only risen slightly to $8,700.

These figures sound a clear warning bell to all of us.

We cannot keep our young people within reach of our common aspirations when they are out of reach of the livelihood that will enable it.

5.

Healthy communities are built on something more than just inclusion. They are also built by actively fostering connection.

I have just been reading some interesting research from America. It is based on a huge survey of high school students which measures their “sense of connection” to their parents, their families and their schools and communities. The survey was taken over a six-year period, and is the first comprehensive US national analysis of the impact of these social settings on adolescent health. There has been so much data collected that the survey will take ten years to fully analyse.

The first report on the survey was produced in 1997 by Robert Blum and Peggy Rinehart of the University of Minnesota.

Their main conclusion is that “...independent of race, ethnicity, family structure and poverty status, adolescents who feel connected to their parents, schools, and community are healthier than those who are not”. The researchers found that “connected” teenagers are far less likely to experiment with drugs and alcohol, become depressed, have early sexual experiences or become pregnant.

Connection makes a difference in the lives of young people.

Connection puts a deeper face to the concept of social inclusion — it is about us “turning up” and being present in the lives of younger people. It is about us having healthy linkages with whatever young people care about.

It is also about us not abandoning them to a youth culture driven by consumer capitalism ... and then later wondering why so of our many young people supposedly don’t have the character and attitudes that we say are needed in the workplace and the families of the future.

6.

Two years ago I was asked to speak on employment issues to a forum of Taranaki Mayors and their chief executives. I was supporting New Plymouth Councillor Elaine Gill in her efforts to establish a “Youthworks” programme which aims to place young unemployed people into work and training opportunities offered by Taranaki community groups.

At the end of our joint presentation about the scheme, there was a time for questions. The Chairman of the Taranaki Regional Council started off by saying that while he supported the proposal, he wanted to play “devils advocate” by asking: Where will the real jobs come from to employ the young people at the end of the scheme?

On the face of it, this seems a perfectly reasonable question to ask. But it is also a question that ties initiatives like “Youthworks” down to immediate and obvious “outcomes”. And it is a question that loses sight of another important reason for creating these programmes: they enable us to do our job in staying connected with these young people.

A great many community work and training programmes are not about direct employment “outcomes”. They are about connection. They are about making sure there are opportunities for these young people to grow and develop their skills and talents, and to do something useful in the communities that they will someday inherit.

And the secret is this: opportunities follow these connections.

I was involved in establishing the Taranaki Work Trust which has been running training programmes for the unemployed since the time of the Access programmes of the mid-1980s. When we were asked to report on our “outcomes” to our government funders, they were usually listed in terms of the numbers of people “placed into employment” or “onto further training”.

What was interesting to me was to discover that many of the young people, who found jobs after being on the training programmes, did so in occupations unrelated to the training that we were offering.

It became clear to me that a major catalyst for change in these young people’s lives was the sense of connection they gained by participating in the programmes, the work habits that they grew into ... and the linkages with employer networks that their participation opened up.

Northland Mayor Yvonne Sharp illustrates this point when she describes the construction of the Te Araroa walking track, which is being supported by the Mayors Taskforce and the Employment Catalyst Fund. A section of the walking track is being built between Ahipara and Kerikeri, and is part of a larger vision to establish a long pathway throughout New Zealand, from Cape Reinga to the Bluff.

The construction of this section of the track is being done by people who were previously long-term unemployed. They have had to learn a whole range of bushcraft skills, be prepared to work hard, and sometimes walk two hours into the track before they can start their day’s work.

Mayor Sharp tells us that local farmers have been very impressed with how keen and capable these young workers are. Some of these people are now being offered farm work in the district.

So for the Mayors Taskforce, the Te Araroa project is not just about building a track which will be an important infrastructure in the local tourism industry. It is also offering connection to these young people who were previously long-term unemployed.

And the opportunities are indeed following these connections.

7.

The fullest participation of young people in our economic life is going to be a much more important issue in the next twenty years. In the end, the urgency of this issue will be a matter of demographics — the changing trends of our population structure.

Finance Minister Michael Cullen this week releases his election-year Budget. Cullen has set himself the goal of a 4% economic growth rate within the next five years ... and he may well get it. He says that 20 years of sustainable growth at this pace will put us back into the top half of the OECD ranking of countries.

But economic commentators point out that the labour market arithmetic behind a 4% growth rate is pretty daunting. Brian Fallow, economics editor at the New Zealand Herald, tells us that a 4% growth rate would require us to double our productivity growth and also the rate at which the workforce has expanded over the past 20 years.

The average annual growth rates over the 1980s and 1990s have been 1.1% for productivity and 1% for the labour force. Both these figures will need to double in order for us to achieve a sustainable 4% growth rate. For the workforce, this means it would have to grow by about 40,000 people each year.

The trouble with this is that the long-term predictions by Statistics NZ tell us that growth in the workforce will actually fall away in the next twenty years. This is because New Zealand’s overall population growth is gradually slowing down.

This also means that our workforce is getting older. The median age of our population is projected to rise from 34 years in 1999 to 38 years by 2011, and further rise to 45 years in 2051. This is a huge change when you consider that the median age for New Zealanders in 1901 was 23 years!

What this change in demographics says to me is that, if New Zealand wants to maintain its current lifestyle, then a key component will be the active economic participation of every young person we can get!

The current “waste” of the one-in-eight young New Zealanders who are unemployed will make no sense at all. We need their fullest participation if we are going to achieve the skilled, smart and valued workforce that will drive our economy towards the sort of growth rate that Michael Cullen is hoping for.

There’s also another big reason why we will need to have as many young people as possible with a livelihood: they are going to be looking after a growing number of elderly people.

At the moment there are about 18 elderly people per 100 people of working-age. This is expected to more than double to 44 elderly people per 100 working-age people by the year 2051. Put it another way: Today we have about five working-age people for every elder. By 2051 there will be just over two working-age people for every elder.

These demographics will have a huge influence on employment and social security issues over the next fifty years. And it will be very much in the interests of my own age group to ensure that our young people have all the work and income they need in order to face this future.

8.

North Shore Councillor Paula Gillon — herself just 18 years of age — has challenged the other young people at this conference to consider standing in the Local Body elections in 2004. I do hope many of you consider and take up this challenge.

I believe the next generation of political leaders is going to have to do much better than their elders in one major aspect: they are going to have to learn to think better about the long-term.

At the Taskforce meeting yesterday, many of the Mayors talked about the problems they are having with skill shortages in their regions — especially on farms, in forestry and in the trades. In recent the problems in the regions have turned from a focus on unemployment to a focus on the many job opportunities that are available — but there aren’t the people with the skills to do them.

Skill shortages relate to our collective ability to think and plan for the longer-term. Skill shortages don’t just come out of the blue. By the time they arrive in our communities they are labour market problems that are already ten years old.

They are the consequence of us not investing — ten years ago — in the next generation of our workers.

You can’t really blame young people for not having the skills that are needed in today’s labour market. We really need to see the skill shortages as a crisis of longer-term governance in both the private and the public sectors. And we need to learn the lessons that come with this crisis.

We know that during the last 15 years many larger businesses — and government departments — got out of doing a training function in order to cut their costs. Businesses started to gamble on the chance that the skills they would need would just “turn up” in the future ... or they would buy them in from overseas. The whole focus was on getting a good short-term bottom line. And this was a strategy that couldn’t ever last.

Now we need these skills, and we need the young people to be interested in upskilling themselves to fill the opportunities that are available. And so this country is having to re-invent many of the training opportunities — like apprenticeships — that used to exist not so long ago.

Our failure to think long-term is very well illustrated in the current crisis in the forestry industry. Last month I travelled to the East Coast and heard industry and local government leaders describe their pressing need for skilled workers and better infrastructure in this sector.

You might say that there is nothing more predictable than the fact that trees grow — and those trees on the East Coast have been growing there for the past thirty years. It therefore seems extraordinary to hear people now screaming out for skilled labour and better roads in the district.

Again, the problem here is a failure of leadership, in both the private and public sectors, which has not attended to the longer-term needs of this important resource.

9.

The last thirty years have seen a huge explosion of technologies which enable us to speed everything up so that we can satisfy our hunger for “outcomes” more quickly.

And as everything speeds up, “the big picture” is often lost in our grab for the short-term bottom-line.

Business people reduce their focus to their next quarterly report for shareholders. Politicians just think about the next three years in their election cycle.

A thirty-year long-term strategy is out of the question.

Somehow we need to culturally change gear.

We are not going to address our systemic problems with unemployment and poverty in our communities unless we can grow a governance and leadership that is much more capable of thinking long-term.

10.

How can we foster a longer-term perspective? A source of inspiration to me comes from an American not-for-profit Foundation led by Daniel Hillis, a designer of super-computers. The Foundation also includes the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog Stewart Brand, futurist Paul Saffo, author Esther Dyson, and the British musician Brian Eno.

This group is warning us that our civilization is revving itself into a pathologically short attention span. They have set up the “Long Now” Foundation to encourage scientists, politicians and business people to take a longer-term perspective in their work, and to take long-term responsibility —which they believe should be measured in terms of centuries.

One of the projects of this group is to build a three-story-high clock that has been dubbed the Clock of the Long Now. The clock is being designed to last for 10,000 years and will tick once a year, chime once a century, and the cuckoo will come out once in a millennium.

There is a particular irony in the fact that Daniel Hillis, a man who developed the architecture behind the current generation of super-computers, has taken up this challenge to build what will be, in effect, the world’s slowest computer. Hillis explains that his work with computers has brought him in contact with a lot of people who seemed obsessed with speed. This has led him to consider that “slow” was becoming the next — unnoticed — frontier.

Stewart Brand says that the Clock will serve both as a practical mechanism and a metaphor for the challenges facing us today. Brand: “ Such a clock, if sufficiently impressive and well engineered, would embody deep time for people. It should become charismatic to visit, interesting to think about, and famous enough to become iconic in the public discourse. Ideally, it would do for thinking about time what the photographs of Earth from space have done for thinking about the environment. Such icons reframe the way people think...”

11.

When I first heard about the Clock of the Long Now, I was reminded of the work of British economist Fritz Schumacher.

I think Schumacher was one of the most important economists of the last century. The publication, 25 years ago, of his book Small is Beautiful marked the beginning of a world-wide movement which has tried to establish an economics “... as if people mattered”.

Schumacher studied economics at New College, in Oxford, England. In his public lectures towards the end of his life, Schumacher often told a story from his old College which illustrates the importance of long-term thinking.

New College has a Dining Hall which was originally built in 1386. In the 1850s, it was discovered that the huge oak beams in the roof of this Hall had become infested with beetles, and needed to be replaced. At the time, the College authorities wondered where they could get new oak beams of the size necessary for this restoration.

Someone then suggested they ask if there were any oaks in the College forestry estates that would be suitable for the job. When they asked the College Forester, he thought about it for a moment, and then replied: “We wondered when you’d be asking for those...”.

It turns out that when the Hall was built in the 14th century, a grove of oaks had also been planted and maintained with the specific intention that they be used to replace the beams when their refurbishment would be required at some time in the future.

This plan had been passed down from one Forester to the next for five hundred years. The word was: “You don’t touch those oaks — they’re for the College Halls”.

Those 14th century architects were certainly in touch with long-term thinking. And their story is something of a fable for the sort of governance we need today — a governance that is also in touch with the long now.

12.

I’m so pleased that nearly half of the delegates to this conference are young people, and that many of you are involved in Youth Councils and Forums that are organised in your districts.

I’m sure that things can only improve for young people if we can grow district and city councils that are better connected with how you are seeing our world.

But there is also a deeper challenge here: we need councils that can focus not just on what young people need today — but also focus on what our great-grandchildren will also be needing in the future.

We need to grow the capacity of politicians and community leaders to have an authentic conversation about the “seventh generation to come”.

And we need to “plant our trees” now ... for that distant time.

13.

The Mayors Taskforce for Jobs is really an attempt to have an authentic conversation about a long-term goal — the goal of completely ending the “waste” of those New Zealanders who are unemployed.

We estimate that achieving the Mayors first goal — of having everyone under 25 years of age into training or employment by the year 2005 — would have an impact on the lives of about 75,000 young people.

This is the great thing about New Zealand — 75,000 seems a very achievable target.

The job is really to get all the major players in government, in local bodies, in businesses, in communities and in families ... all working in the same direction.

We need to case-manage all these young people on a one-by-one basis until we achieve the Mayor’s goals.

And this is not just a task for the Department of Work and Income. It’s not even just a “whole of government” task. It’s a task that will require the co-operation, collaboration and co-ordination of the “whole of our communities” in order to ensure that we get the details right.

14.

The Mayor’s goals are cultural goals ... and they may take a generation for us to achieve.

The good news is that we didn’t just start two years ago with the creation of the Mayors Taskforce for Jobs.

This task was actually started in the early 1990s when Jim Anderton and Jim Bolger brought together a multi-party Taskforce on Employment.

In 1994, this Taskforce released its report containing hundreds of recommendations, and set the target that, by the year 2000, “no-one in New Zealand would be out of work or training for longer than six months.”

Well, we all know that we failed to reach that particular goal. But we haven’t let it go.

In bringing together the Mayors Taskforce, Christchurch Mayor Garry Moore is picking up this target again, and challenging his fellow Mayors to keep these cultural aspirations alive.

The Mayors in this Taskforce are an interesting group, and they reflect within their membership a cross-section of the political views held by New Zealanders.

To some extent, the Mayors are carrying on the spirit of the multi-party approach to these issues that was begun by Jim Anderton and Jim Bolger in the early 1990s.

My hope for this election year is that we could continue this non-partisan approach to our employment challenges.

It would be great if all the major political parties decided to get in behind the Mayors goals ... and go to the country for a full mandate in making these goals a national purpose.

The Mayors Taskforce has the potential to be different from its 1994 predecessor because it is trying to address these issues at a deeper level.

Cultural goals speak to us about inclusion and connection and our need to take a longer view of livelihood in our communities.

Cultural goals reframe the way people think.

In this case, the Mayor’s goals have the potential to turn our employment challenges into opportunities for good work.

And, over time, they build a legacy that becomes the New Zealand that we all want to live in.

vivian Hutchinson
May 2000

vivian@jobsletter.org.nz
www.jobsletter.org.nz/vivian.htm

NOTES and LINKS

This paper is also available on the internet at www.jobsletter.org.nz/vivian/spirit02.htm, or can be downloaded in PDF format at www.jobsletter.org.nz/pdf/spirit02.pdf.

The Spirit of Youth : Pu Maia Rangatahi — Youth in Local Government Conference 2002 was organised by the Rotorua District Council in partnership with the Mayors Taskforce for Jobs. The conference is held every two years and is an opportunity for Mayors, Councillors, staff and young people to share experiences and ideas about involving youth in local government activities and decisions. Over seventy youth delegates attended the conference, and workshops were structured around three streams of “environment”, “inclusion” and “employment”.

Keynote speakers included vivian Hutchinson, Paula Gillon (a.k.a. The Naked Politician, Councillor with the North Shore City Council ) and Phil Crane (Queensland University of Technology, specialist on Youth and Public Spaces). Papers from the conference are available on the conference website at www.rotoruanz.com/yilg2002/

Special thanks to Grahame and Sandy Hall.

Members of the Mayors Taskforce for Jobs who attended this conference included Garry Moore (chairman, Mayor of Christchurch), Sukhi Turner (deputy, Mayor of Dunedin), Jenny Brash (Mayor of Porirua), Tim Shadbolt (Mayor of Invercargill), Frana Cardno (Mayor of Southland), Graeme Ramsey (Mayor of Kaipara), Grahame Hall (Mayor of Rotorua), Yvonne Sharpe (Mayor of the Far North), Pat O’Dea (Mayor of Buller), Jan Beange (Mayor of Tauranga), Peter Tennent (Mayor of New Plymouth), John Forbes (Mayor of Opotiki), Les Probert (Mayor of Wairoa), Brian Jeffares (Mayor of Stratford), Bob Parker (Mayor of Banks Peninsula), and Wynne Raymond (Mayor of Timaru).

The objectives of the Mayors Taskforce for Jobs are:

— to provide a national focus of leadership on the jobs issue through co-operation between Mayors concerned about employment issues in their communities,

— to share best practice on what we can achieve on employment at the local level,

— to create local and national forums which address the “big picture” of trends on the issues of income and work,

— to link with imaginative private sector initiatives that are addressing unemployment.

The Taskforce is working towards to main goals:

— Goal One, that by 2005, no young person under 25 years will be out of work or training in our communities.

— Goal Two, that by 2009, all people in our communities will have the opportunity to be in work or training.

The Mayors Taskforce for Jobs website is at www.jobsletter.org.nz/mtfjobs.htm

Employment statistics are taken from the March 2002 Household Labour Force Survey by Statistics NZ. The “Statistics That Matter” summaries published by The Jobs Letter are at www.jobsletter.org.nz/stt/stathome.htm

this basic human right. “ Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of employment, and to protection against unemployment.” — from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948)

“Connections that Make a Difference in the Lives of Youth” by Robert Blum and Peggy Rinehart of the Division of General Pediatrics and Adolescent Health, University of Minnesota, based on the US National Longitudinal Study on Adolescent Health (Add Health). Full copy of the monograph (40pg PDF format 923KB ) can be downloaded from www.allaboutkids.umn.edu/cfahad/Reducing_the_risk.pdf

The Employment Catalyst Fund is a project of The Jobs Research Trust which is acting as a funding manager for The Tindall Foundation. The priority of the Fund is to support initiatives emerging from the Mayors Taskforce for Jobs, and specifically contribute to their first goal that, “by 2005, no young person under 25 years will be out of work or training in our communities.” A full list of projects being funded by the Employment Catalyst can be found at www.jobsletter.org.nz/catalyst.htm

The Taranaki Employment Foundation Trust has been part-funded by the Employment Catalyst Fund for its “Youthworks” programme which will provide 40 full-time paid jobs in the not-for-profit sector for unemployed young people. The programme develops their skills and provides them with qualifications to gain full time employment, while also making an important contribution to the well-being of the Taranaki community. The project is being championed by Taskforce Mayor Peter Tennent (New Plymouth).

The Te Araroa Trust has been part-funded by the Employment Catalyst Fund for work on the formation and development of an “Ocean to Ocean Trail” from Ahipara to Kerikeri in Northland. The project hopes to create employment both in the building of the trail and in servicing the tourism facilities engendered by the trail. The project is being championed by the Taskforce Mayor Yvonne Sharp (Far North).

The fuller vision of the Te Araroa (Long Pathway) is being supported by the Mayors Taskforce for Jobs as part of its strategic plan for 2002-3. The Te Araroa Trust website is at www.teararoa.org.nz.

Brian Fallow: “ A 4 per cent growth rate would require us to double the rate at which the workforce has expanded over the past 20 years, in defiance of the demographic trends. It would require a revolutionary doubling of productivity growth for two decades. OECD figures show that over the 1980s and 1990s, growth in the labour input (hours worked) explained 46 per cent of economic growth over that period, while growth in labour productivity (output per hour worked) contributed 54 per cent. The average annual growth rates were 1.1 per cent for productivity and 1 per cent for the labour force. Both would need to double to get sustainable 4 per cent growth [...] If we were looking for workforce growth to contribute half of the desired 4 per cent trend growth, the workforce would have to be growing by 2 per cent, or around 40,000 people, a year.”
— from “Growth's daunting arithmetic” by Brian Fallow, economics editor at the New Zealand Herald, available online at www.nzherald.co.nz/storydisplay.cfm?storyID=1844390.

Median age. Half the population is older and half the population is younger than this age.

Ageing population figures and charts from Statistics NZ Hot off the Press New Zealand Population Projections 1999 – 2051 Commentary, available on the Statistics NZ website at www.stats.govt.nz

The Clock of the Long Now — Time and Responsibility, by Stewart Brand (pub 2000 Basic Books) ISBN 0465007805.
More information on the Long Now Foundation can be found at www.longnow.org

Fritz Schumacher, British economist. See Small Is Beautiful : Economics As If People Mattered — Special Edition 25 Years Later by E. F. Schumacher, Preface by James Robertson, and Introduction by Paul Hawken (pub 1999 Hartley & Marks) ISBN 0881791695;
and Good Work (pub 1979 HarperCollins) ISBN 0061320536 — a collection of Schumacher’s speeches published after his death

The Jobs Research Trust was established in 1994 “... to develop and distribute information that will help our communities create more jobs and reduce unemployment and poverty in New Zealand”.

Trustees include vivian Hutchinson, Jo Howard, Dave Owens and Rodger Smith.
Secretary is Shirley Vickery. Contact: P.O.Box 428, New Plymouth, Taranaki, New Zealand phone 06-753-4434, fax 06-753-4430
email trustees@jobsletter.org.nz. website www.jobsletter.org.nz

vivian Hutchinson has been one of the pioneers in community-based action for jobs in New Zealand, especially in establishing programmes for the support and education of unemployed people. He was a founder of the Taranaki Work Trust, and its associated projects in the Starting Point Employment Resource Centre, Skills of Enterprise Business Courses, and the Enterprise Centre. He has also been involved in establishing many practical training programmes for unemployed people, and the Green Dollar local employment trading networks.
In 1994, vivian co-founded The Jobs Research Trust and established The Jobs Letter, a community-based media project that distributes “essential information” on employment and economic issues and the future of work.
As an consultant, vivian has helped with the establishment of enterprise and economic development units at a local government level, the creation of the Labour Department’s Community Employment Group and Be Your Own Boss programmes, and has been an adviser to Local Employment Co-ordination (LEC) groups.
In 1999, vivian helped establish the Mayors Taskforce for Jobs, and acts as Community Adviser to this initiative.

— Previous speeches and papers by vivian Hutchinson can be accessed from his homepage at www.jobsletter.org.nz/vivian.htm. These include:

Making Hope Possible — some thoughts on the Mayors Taskforce for Jobs (2000) available at www.jobsletter.org.nz/vivian/mtfj2000.htm.

A Capable Age — some thoughts on the “zero waste” of young people (2002) available at www.jobsletter.org.nz/vivian/youth02.htm.