ACT – Getting New Zealanders Working Again: A Hand-up Into Real Jobs

New Zealanders are hard workers and employment is central to our society. It underpins stable families and strong communities. Unemployment saps potential and its human cost is too high; in the long term unemployment can be a factor in dependency, family breakdown and crime.

ACT says New Zealand’s unemployment rate is unnecessarily high. We understand that the majority of jobs in New Zealand are created by small and medium-sized businesses. To reduce unemployment we need policies that enable these businesses to create jobs. ACT aims to remove barriers to work and help people get off benefits and into the real jobs they need. A hand up, not a hand out.

ACT’s goals are:
* Through a fully-funded Welfare to Work scheme that involves community-based providers, together with ACT’s proposals to create new jobs, to lower the number of registered unemployed by a third within three years.

* To have the lowest unemployment rate in the OECD.

ACT believes:

* Those who can work should work – welfare should be a springboard back to work.

* Government policy must assist those on welfare to overcome any barriers to work.

* High taxation and government regulation cost jobs.

ACT will:

* Break the cycle of dependency.

* Adapt for New Zealand the best initiatives from hand-up welfare programmes in other countries such as the US and Britain.

* Ensure that assistance is tailored to meet the needs of individuals and move from the “one-size- fits-all” welfare state.

* Support community-based welfare programmes.

* Make it easier for businesses to hire more staff.

* Cut taxes, government red tape and bureaucracy.

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Gordon Campbell: On the Sony cyber attack

Given the layers of meta-irony involved, the saga of the Sony cyber attack seemed at the outset more like a snarky European art film than a popcorn entry at the multiplex.

Yet now with (a) President Barack Obama weighing in on the side of artistic freedom and calling for the US to make a ‘proportionate response’quickly followed by (b) North Korea’s entire Internet service going down, and with both these events being followed by (c) Sony deciding to backtrack and release The Interview film that had made it a target for the dastardly North Koreans in the first place, then ay caramba…the whole world will now be watching how this affair pans out. More>>