Job Summit - outcomes for local government
The Government's recent Job Summit provided an opportunity to identify specific actions to help maintain and generate jobs as we navigate our way through the economic downturn.
The Summit's strength was in its collaborative approach to tackling a problem that clearly exceeds the capacity of any one sector to resolve. A recession is a time when all sectors need to play their part in minimising job losses and further economic decline through a set of cross-sector initiatives.
Many of the popular ideas focused on boosting tourism, like the proposal to build a national cycle-way from one end of New Zealand to the other. The cycle-way has the potential to create 3000 - 4000 jobs over a wide geographical spread.
Other ideas like the nine-day fortnight are being implemented quickly to reduce the number of redundancies in the private sector.
As joint chair of the Maori Economy, Local and Regional Government workstream I was extremely impressed with the quality of discussion at the Summit.
The Summit identified a range of priority and long-term initiatives for local government.
The three high priority areas are:
- councils agree to rollout good practice and streamline consenting processes
- councils commit to bringing forward infrastructure development (including investigating the aggregation of council debt and working with Maori to better facilitate the use of Maori land and investment in infrastructure development)
- mayors commit to broadening the scope of the Mayors Taskforce for Jobs.
Local Government New Zealand is progressing a range of initiatives as the practicalities of these are worked through, and will work and consult with members as needed.
To follow the progress on all the workstream's proposals visit http://beehive.govt.nz/feature/summit.
Lawrence Yule
President, Local Government New Zealand
