Prime Minister Christopher Luxon believes he has an answer to the high youth unemployment rate, encouraging young people struggling to find work to move to the regions.
Others insist this is not a viable option, and believe it will create more expenses and separate young people from their support network.
Currently 12.9 percent of 15-24 year olds are not in education or work, compared to the national unemployment rate of 5.2 percent.
The government said it wanted to stop young people becoming “trapped” on the Jobseeker benefit, so from November next year, they will introduce a parental assistance test, meaning 18-19-year-olds whose parents earn more than $65,000 a year will no longer be able to claim the benefit.
Luxon said primary industries like horticulture were crying out for young people to come and work for them, while those working in horticulture said jobs were sparse.
Over the past two years, Rachel has struggled to find enough work to get by and that has left her in a place where she doesn’t have enough to support her 19-year-old daughter, as well as herself.
For her, the govenment’s announcement last Sunday came as a big shock.
“I’ve lost a lot of work and I’m now in that classic underemployed category, where I’m sort of running a deficit of about $500 a month to pay all my bills,” she said. “Unfortunately, I’ve now run out of savings.”
Her daughter has taken out student allowance throughout the year, while studying, but when that stops in a few weeks, she will need a job to survive over the summer. She’s been looking all year, but so far, she has found nothing.
Rachel said, if her daughter could not get a benefit, she was not sure she could support her.
“I can’t support myself at the moment,” she said. “My daughter is an adult and she’s young, she’s 19, but as a parent you want your kids to see you winning.
“I feel like a little bit of a failure as a mother.”
Luxon is confident he has the answers for people like Rachel’s daughter, who are struggling to find work.
“If you go outside of Wellington, and go to the Hawke’s Bay or go to the South Island, where I was last week, in the primary industries, for example, in our growing industries, they’re crying out for young people to come and join those sectors or those jobs.
“They do have jobs, but often what happens is the people will take a job, they’ll only stick with it for a couple days and they don’t show up on time.”
Rachel said her daughter had thought of looking outside of Wellington for work, but that would pose its own challenges.
“My daughter is actually looking at returning to a small town we lived in, because she thinks she might be able to get a job there, but then the issue she’s got, she started crunching the numbers and she’d had to rent a house.
“Suddenly, the impacts of that override the short period of time she can leave town to work for.
“Telling people to move towns for work is really unrealistic and it also further takes these young people away from their support networks.”
When Oliver was 18, he spent four months looking for work and, in line with the prime minister’s suggestion, found a job fruit picking in Waikato, but after only four days, he received an email saying he was no longer employed at the orchard.
“They said that it was something to do with the season being out for Royal Gala apples, so they didn’t need me anymore, but it didn’t really match up with the time.”
Oliver said he tried his best at the job, but reckoned he was let go, because he was not picking fruit fast enough. He said his training involved a 10-minute chat and he was not given much of a chance to learn.
He thought the prime minister’s comments did not take young people’s experiences into consideration.
“It’s kind of upsetting, isn’t it, because has he done those sorts of jobs before? It’s kind of a sucky thing to say, when the work isn’t that easy and the pay isn’t that great.”
Dan works in horticulture in Christchurch and also thought the prime minister’s comments missed the mark.
“I think he jumped to horticulture, because it’s notoriously poorly paid, so he probably made the assumption that it’s an entry-level field that you can go into, but it’s not.
“You need to have a lot of experience to land a job in horticulture.”
Dan said most horticulture work required experience and knowledge, and it was not for the faint hearted.
“It is hard work, it is physically demanding, lots of lifitng,” he said. “You have to be physically fit, on your feet all day, lots of walking, outdoors all the time, and that is challenging and tiring.”
Even if young people wanted to give it a go, Dan said jobs in the industry were sparse.
“There’s not been a lot of jobs in the past 12 months that I’ve been looking.”
The introduction of the parental assistance test for Jobseeker benefits will come into action from November 2026.
