Pansy Wong MP
National Party Associate Immigration Spokeswoman

10 June 2007

At least $1 million down the tubes on jobs site?

“New Zealand’s most expensive job website is to be dumped - at the cost of $1 million to the taxpayer,” says National Party ACC spokeswoman Pansy Wong.

Mrs Wong understands Immigration New Zealand is poised to pull the plug on NetworkZonline after it spent more than $1 million to set it up and then budgeted $86,400 a year to run it.

“This has been a total waste of taxpayer money.”

Mrs Wong says for months the taxpayer-funded website has had only a handful of job vacancies. There were only two jobs on the site in February when the alarm was raised.

“It has cost the taxpayer at least $23,671 to keep the site running since then. That has given the Minister time to devise an embarrassing exit plan.”

Mrs Wong understands that Immigration New Zealand is dumping the website in favour of a new similar site that will be set up by the Auckland Chamber of Commerce. It will be called NZrecuitme.co.nz.

“This’ll probably do a better job and the taxpayer won’t be footing the bill. Why the Minister didn’t look for help from outside agencies before committing a million taxpayer dollars on an untendered, untested project escapes me.”

Mrs Wong says there are now serious questions about the process that the Minister should answer.

“David Cunliffe has admitted his department did not tender out the project for creating networkzonline.co.nz. In light of this fiasco we deserve to know why?

“We also deserve to know how much research the Minister did before approving a million dollars of taxpayer money for a site that was barely used. Did he dream up the idea himself?”

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