KEY POINTS:
The Prime Minister's Think-Fest is underway at the cavernous TelstraClear Pacific Events Centre in Manukau.
By the end of the day, we are expected to see a list of the dozen biggest and best ideas for keeping and creating jobs, and perhaps a longer list of other ideas generated.
They are being hatched by 200 of the country's business, union, and sector group leaders at what is formally described as The Prime Minister's Summit on Employment.
Actually a lot of the work has been done already. The idea of a nine-day fortnight with a 10th day (possibly subsidised) for retraining is one of those that has been out and about for a while.
I have been sitting in on the workshop run by Air New Zealand CE Rob Fyfe and the Council of Trade Unions President Helen Kelly and includes the Minister of Labour, Kate Wilkinson.
Reporting is under Chatham House rules which means the attendees can speak without fear of being quoted. The workshop split up into sub groups and I sat in briefly on the one being chaired by Andrew Little of the EPMU with Business New Zealand's Phil O'Reilly there too.
The lunchtime speaker at the jobs summit was a Shanghai-based Kiwi, Andrew Grant, who spoke with all the upbeat presentational skills of his father, former televangelist Ian Grant.
Grant the younger is the managing director and general manager of McKinsey and Company's Greater China region - an international firm of consultants that advise business, governments and institutions on performance.
His advice: prepare for mountain weather - economic mountain weather.
"Weather at mountain altitude, the wind speed, the temperatures, the volatility, the severity of outcome is just different to weather at sea level."
Taking about some of McKinsey's clients he said many had put in place what they called "a corporate financial crisis situation room."
He talked about companies needing to do things differently, needing fast response times to cope with unfolding developments - measures equivalent to an immediate injection into the bloodstream.
Finance Minister Bill English followed Grant, quipping about his speech.
"Don' you just love the way consultants chunk it down... and make is [so] exciting that you are going to pay for it."
The delegates are back at their workshops now, honing the ideas into presentable and affordable bites.
I have my own idea to add to the mix - based on recent personal experience more training for IT house calls. It took me two weeks recently to get an appointment with the firm that sorts out my IT troubles - Geeks on Wheels.
The reason for that was that is that demand is high and I wanted the same geek that fixed my laptop last time, Dave. One of the reasons he could not come earlier, apart from being in demand himself, is that he had to go to Auckland to help conduct interviews for a vacancy. They had received 300 applications for the one job, some of the former IT tutors.
It seems pretty obvious that with demand for jobs high, tutors out of work and demand for services high that someone could join the dots somewhere and create a win-win-win situation.
John Key has been wandering around the workshops.
Earlier he gave the delegates a send-off to their workshops asking them to roll up their sleeves, pull together and get going.
He described New Zealand as "not a country of whiners...not a country of slackers... and not a country of selfish individuals", all of of which sounded a little more like an aspiration than reality.
But Reserve Bank Governor Alan Bollard made a more controversial speech this morning in his opening speech as the PM. Bollard reminded the banking representatives of how much profit they had made in New Zealand in the good times "but of course we want your contributions, the bankers hers, in bad times as well.
He also told them "don't under-estimate the amount of corporate anger that is out there currently with regard to the banking system."
Finance Minister Bill English gets the floor this afternoon no doubt to give the delegates the clear message that any money spent on their ideas will have to pass a rigorous test.
Picture: Delegates at the summit today. Photo / Kenny Rodger
