KEY POINTS:
If two heads are better than one, 200 heads should be better still.
Whether that proves to be the case about Friday's Jobs Summit will not be apparent for a couple of years, says the conference's chairman, Mark Weldon.
"Let's look back in 24 months' time and see how we performed compared with other countries which are being buffeted by the same global conditions," he said when asked how the summit's success should be judged.
The quality of the preliminary analytical work done and the suggestions received augured well, he said.
Government, businesses and unions recognised they would get better outcomes by working together than if Government just tried to write the rules, businesses just tried to maximise profits and unions just tried to maximise wages.
Participants had been thinking hard about what might be done. People were not going to just bowl along, look around and ask, "Anyone got any bright ideas?"
Some might turn up with ideological or narrowly self-interested agendas. It would be up to him and those chairing the break-out groups the conference would divide into to have highly developed "porkometers" and ensure proceedings did not get hijacked, Mr Weldon said.
The aim was preserve and grow employment "but with the very strong caveat that they have to be real jobs, not make-work ones". There was no suggestion at this point of a direct payroll subsidy.
But the recession could be an opportunity to upskill the workforce, in order to raise productivity when the economy recovered - "as it will".
If that involved a cost to the taxpayer, it had to be set alongside the cost of unemployment itself in tax revenue lost and benefits paid.
"There's a presumption that the normal channels of skill delivery probably won't be able to manage the throughput we would expect over the next couple of years. So the question is, what underutilised capacities are there that might be used in training?"
How to tap New Zealand rather than migrant labour for seasonal work would also be on the agenda.
Averting a dire decline in business investment is another area of focus. Mr Weldon said the Treasury estimated it could decline by a steep 25 per cent and even that might be light.
Such a fall would spread the recession's effects beyond sectors directly affected such as tourism, construction and manufacturing to all sorts of firms suppling goods and services to other businesses.
But any proposal in that area would have to be tightly connected to boosting investment and not merely easing business cashflows, he said.
Another area of concern is firms' continued ability to access the finance they need, both working capital to keep them in business, and growth capital they need in order to expand.
That could mean an expanded role for the retail bond market, Mr Weldon said. The conference was likely to consider how the cost of such funding might be reduced.
