'Cool' centres proposed to help jobless teenagers

Nicholas Tuitasi wants to give unemployed youth opportunities to start their own businesses. Photo / Kenny Rodger

Former Mt Roskill youth worker Nick Tuitasi wants to give unemployed youth a chance to become entrepreneurs, turning their dole money into capital for business initiatives.

He wants to create "cool" centres that young people would go to to learn new skills until they could find paid jobs.

They would be able to choose interest groups such as gardening, mechanics and house maintenance, and would be paid the equivalent of the dole to set up businesses.

"If they want to do gardening or planting trees they join the landscaping outfit, and an entrepreneur gets alongside them and they build a business," he said.

"Then you've got the petrolheads who want to work on cars.

"You get them alongside the employers who say, 'we can't give you a paid job but the Government will pay the equivalent of the benefit'.

"Or it may be that they pick up on old people who need assistance with their houses. The Government needs to change policies to access some of the old people's super so the old people get the benefit [of work on their houses] straight away. Or their money could be taken out of their estates later - I'm sure they will say yes."

Mr Tuitasi, who manages the Ministry of Social Development's Pacific youth development strategy, presented his idea in a working group at the jobs summit yesterday.

It was not picked up in the broader summit because he had not been involved in the emails and conference calls among delegates in the weeks before the summit, which led to agendas of ideas yesterday. He said Prime Minister John Key's office rang him only two days before the summit to ask him to attend.

But he said that if nothing was done, hundreds of thousands of unemployed young people would either turn to crime or waste their time playing PlayStation.

Others were piling up student loans trying course after course but never finding what they wanted to do.

He suggested a name for the scheme: MOVE, standing for "motivate", "opportunities", "values", and "employment" or "encouragement".

He was less sure who should run it.

"It could be a private enterprise that government puts something into, or it could be some agency that exists."