It was the big bang response to the deepening recession. But 12 months on, what difference has the Job Summit made?
A year ago today, the language of the recession was apocalyptic.
"We are facing the biggest destruction of global wealth the world has ever seen," Reserve Bank Governor Alan Bollard told Prime Minister John Key's "Job Summit".
New Zealand Institute economist Benedikte Jensen warned of "a worrying possibility that unemployment could rise from a historical low of 4.2 per cent to a rate of 11.2 per cent over the next two years".
Panic-stricken governments were pumping out mind-blowing sums of money to keep people spending. Across the Tasman, Kevin Rudd gave every low-income Australian family a A$1000 ($1300) Christmas present at the end of 2008 and more just before Key's summit.
A year later, the worst of the crisis may be over. China's breakneck growth has resumed, Australia has avoided recession altogether and in New Zealand economic output bottomed last March and has grown again since then - admittedly at the barely discernible rate of just 0.2 per cent a quarter.
Employment dropped last year by 53,000 (2.4 per cent). Unemployment jumped to 7.3 per cent, with 276,000 people "jobless" including 168,000 who are both available to work and actively seeking it and therefore counted as "unemployed".
That's much worse than Australia, where unemployment is 5.3 per cent and dropping.
But we still have the 10th-lowest unemployment rate out of 30 OECD nations, below the average of 8.8 per cent. And if the economists can be believed, it won't get much worse.
So can we thank John Key?
The answer, probably, is yes - but only a little bit.
The job summit produced 20 "big ideas". The biggest of them fell over, but some of the others have saved a few jobs.
The biggest idea was for a $2 billion fund to invest in new businesses that was to have been financed equally by the Government and the banks.
But Key abandoned the idea in April because officials took fright at loading the banks up with potentially risky lending when it was deemed crucial to maintain confidence in the banks' stability.
The highest-profile idea didn't make the "top 20" but was added by Key at the end of the summit - a "national bike trail" from Cape Reinga to Bluff.
He extracted $50 million for it over three years in the May Budget, and work has started at four sites, creating a few track construction jobs. It is expected to be a catalyst for cafes and other tourist services in the longer term, but that will be well after the recession is over.
The other idea that caught the public imagination was the "nine-day fortnight", which became a minimum-wage subsidy for up to five hours a fortnight for six months to employers who cut working hours by at least 10 hours a fortnight, on condition that they saved jobs that would otherwise have been lost.
Fifty employers have used the scheme, 32 of them in the first four months when the recession was toughest. They have been given subsidies for 4092 workers on condition that they saved 623 jobs that would have gone otherwise.
National Distribution Union secretary Robert Reid, who negotiated several of the deals, says the scheme worked "exactly as it was designed to".
Summit Wool Spinners in Oamaru, which saved 57 of the 623 jobs saved so far, originally planned to lay off 105 of its 300 employees but used the deal to reduce the number of redundancies to 48 - all voluntary.
As hoped, business picked up during the six-month deal.
"They have been through that hole in production, they are all back on their normal working week, and some of the people made redundant have been called back," says Reid.
The summit also reinforced a pre-election National Party promise to catch up with a backlog in infrastructure spending. Ministers approved an extra $500 million on new schools, roads and state house upgrades just before the summit, and Finance Minister Bill English said this month that these projects were creating an extra 2900 jobs.
The May Budget added an extra $1 billion over three years above previous plans for state highways, including a tunnel under Auckland's Victoria Park and completion of the city's western motorway ring route.
Another $347 million over four years was earmarked to pay up to $1800 towards insulating each of 188,500 homes, creating about 2000 jobs.
In some areas this state spending has been offset by local government cutbacks aimed at trimming rates. Local Government NZ president Lawrence Yule says council proposals for projects that could be brought forward with central government help are still stalled in the Treasury's infrastructure unit.
But he says other councils, such as Hamilton and Dunedin, have deliberately kept their spending up to support their local economies, and that national statistics show most council spending up by 5 to 8 per cent.
"We are more than pulling our weight," he says.
As unemployment continued to rise sharply in the months after the job summit, youth unemployment rose to the top of the agenda. Young people aged 15 to 24 accounted for two-thirds of the 53,000 jobs lost last year.
In August the Government revived fully subsidised work schemes for the first time since the 1980s - but only for those aged 16 to 24.
The "Community Max" scheme, which pays non-profit agencies the full cost of employing a young person for six months, has proved so popular that applications have already exceeded the 3230 places allocated until the end of this year. The scheme was closed off on February 7.
"Job Ops", a $5000 subsidy to any employer who takes on a young person for six months, has been expanded from an initial 4000 places to 6000. Just over 3800 positions had been approved by the end of January.
The August package also included 2000 extra places a year for 16- and 17-year-olds, mainly in polytechnics, as the first step towards a planned "youth guarantee" of a job or training place to everyone under 18.
A further 700 places in polytechnics were found for this year using money that had not been spent in past years.
The Government has also continued to give redundant workers higher family support and accommodation subsidies for up to 16 weeks, although the numbers receiving this have halved from 1258 last September to just 610 last month as the economy recovers.
The number of employers bringing in Work and Income to help manage redundancies has also dwindled, from 444 employers laying off 6933 workers in the first half of last year to 243 employers and just 3492 workers in the second half.
Both unions and employers believe the job summit helped the recovery along.
"It made everyone focus on jobs," says Council of Trade Unions president Helen Kelly.
"It made safe the conversations that went on afterwards," echoes Phil O'Reilly of Business NZ. "In the days and weeks afterwards I was getting a lot of phone calls from employers saying, 'The nine-day fortnight doesn't work for us, but would something else work?' I said, 'Yeah, go for your life!"'
Nevertheless, both also believe more could have been done. They say an opportunity was missed to retrain redundant workers. "I don't think the Government focused on skills enough," says O'Reilly.
Auckland University of Technology vice-chancellor Derek McCormack says schemes such as the youth guarantee targeted "the bottom end of the tertiary sector", but there was no money for more places at the top end where students could have come out of the recession ready to contribute value to the economy.
"That would have dragged up the employment market so there was room at the bottom for people without qualifications," he says.
Newly appointed Tertiary Education Minister Steven Joyce is looking at funding more tertiary student places next year by cutting spending on student loans and allowances.
But he rejected a job summit proposal to include training requirements in state procurement contracts because it would have been too inflexible.
"For example, one project might be particularly suited to a certain level of people in training, and another one might be highly technical and less suited to it," he says.
For the 168,000 unemployed, who were not invited to the job summit, the whole exercise has left a bitter taste.
Linda Brett, a former sales and marketing agent who started a jobseekers' self-support network in Waitakere last year, says 21 members of her group have found jobs but others, including herself, are still looking. "I'd like to see more job creation. I haven't really seen anything," she says. "They had some of the best minds in the country trying to think of ideas for how to create jobs, and nothing came out of it that was really tangible.
"But people like our group did it. We have created something that works that is really good. So if we can do it, on no money whatsoever, why can't they?"
www.jobseekersnetwork.org
