Wellington, NEW ZEALAND — The unemployment rate for Pacific people is 12.1 percent, more than double the national average, and the Salvation Army says it may get worse.
Stats NZ released its quarterly labor market figures on Wednesday (6 August- NZT), according to RNZ Pacific.
For the June quarter, the national average unemployment rate was 5.2 percent – 0.5 percentage points higher than this time last year. It is the highest it has been since 2020. Meanwhile, the unemployment rate for Pacific people has increased 3.8 percentage points in the past 12 months.
Ana Ika, social policy analyst at the Salvation Army, told Pacific Waves that the higher unemployment rate for Pacific reflected difficulties around finding work and education opportunities in the current climate.
“Our labor force participation rate actually hasn’t changed that much, but our unemployment has increased,” she said.
That indicated a lot of young people had entered the labour force and were not securing jobs or training and education opportunities, she said.
“We would think… that a lot of that unemployment for Pacific is predominantly our young people,” Ika added.
Stats NZ figures showed the economy shrunk by about 2000 jobs in the June quarter. Over 12 months, that number totaled 16,000 jobs.
Nationally, the number of people aged 15 to 24 in education had also increased in the June quarter, which Stats NZ said could be due to the current labor market conditions.
Ika said Pasefika people were hit particularly hard due to the industries they tended to work in.
“If you look at where a lot of our Pacific are employed, you know areas like agriculture and … construction, those industries have actually been stagnant or declining in regards to job opportunities.
“If those industries don’t pick up … that just sets the scene that there won’t be a lot of job opportunities for people in our community.”
Ika said while people wanted to be hopeful about the economic climate, a lot of factors showed “it’s not necessarily looking good” for employment rates for Pacific people.
The agency’s support services were seeing the direct impacts of that, she said.
“We’re seeing families struggling, we’re seeing need for financial mentoring, we’re seeing need in regards to food support … often the underlying issue in that is to do with financial hardship.
The government’s policies around welfare support simply added more pressure for people in a tough jobs market, she said.
“You’ve got all of the sanctions that are happening with MSD [the Ministry of Social Development], all of the restrictions in regards to housing support. And so there are all of these policy decisions that our government has made to … decrease spending.
“But the fact of the matter is … they’re trying to push people into employment but there’s sort of no jobs.”
People in those situations often needed “buffers like welfare support” but investment in those services had been cut back too, Ika said.
Finance Minister Nicola Willis said the figures were better than forecast.
“Prior to the election, Treasury had forecasted that at this point in time, there would be 8000 more people unemployed than has actually turned out to be the case,” she said.
Willis said the government was concerned for every New Zealander who wanted a job and couldn’t get one.
She also said the 16,000 people who had lost their jobs in the past 12 months “shouldn’t take it personally”.
“What we have inherited is the horrible human aftershock of poor economic management.
“[It’s] what happens when you let interest rates and inflation get out of control is that it strangles an economy and it strangles job creation.”
