Cynical on the job summit: So sue us!
I realise today that we came off as cynical about the job summit. Jobs are important, and there are issues that businesses and the economy have to work through.
However, the type of discussion we saw through the Herald today was not the sort of thing that we were hoping for: The biggest issue seems to be a nationwide cycleway!!
Now before you tell us off for being too negative I would like to point out that we did talk about possible government reactions on February 11th – at the behest of the Inquiring Mind blog. It can be found here. Our recommendations were:
- Move forward infrastructure when there is a hole in employment,
- Improve the structure of taxes (something we will discuss tomorrow),
- Integrate skills and education policy with unemployment policy.
Ideas that stick to this theme will be useful – but adding additional, pointless, infrastructure spending or arbitrarily fiddling with structural policies in the economy is not the way to sort things out. However, as the different members of the job summit gave their speech’s, the useful updates from the Herald site gave us the impression that these were just the sort of policies that are being looked at 🙁
If you believe the “fest” was more successful, then tell us. Within a few weeks it will be clear whether it was – once we see the set of policies released by both government and big business in response. I am not holding my breath …