2017 – Ongoing jobless tally
All unemployment data from Statistics NZ should therefore be treated with caution. Unemployment is likely to be much higher than Statistics NZ figures indicate.
All unemployment data from Statistics NZ should therefore be treated with caution. Unemployment is likely to be much higher than Statistics NZ figures indicate.
English’s bland assertion that “government actually with a good record on addressing, in fact, some of the toughest social issues” is at variance with actual, real, mounting socio-economic problems in this country.
This blogger previously reported how Statistics NZ recently implemented a so-called “revision” which would materially affect how unemployment stats were counted and reported;
A person job-searching using the internet was “not actively seeking work“. Predictably, at the stroke of a pen, unemployment “fell” over-night from 5.7% to 5.2%.
TV3’s The Nation on 2 July was probably the most incisive investigative journalism this blogger has seen for a long time. The only “fault” is that The Nation is ‘buried’ at the ghetto time-slot of early Saturday (and repeated early Sunday morning). Mediaworks is wasting a tremendous opportunity to use their current affairs journalistic team as a critical lynch-pin of their broadcasting line-up.
At the stroke of a pen, unemployment fell from 5.7% to 5.2%. Simply because if a person was job-searching using the internet they were “not actively seeking work“. Which beggars belief as the majority of jobseekers will be using the internet. It is the 21st century – what else would they be using?
This government has done what few other Western democracies have achieved; a state of Orwellianism that Stalinist Russia, Nazi Germany, and other dictatorships required unrelenting brute force to achieve.
So by the numbers, for this year;
As I have pointed out in previous blogposts, when threatened with bad headlines or a scandal of some description, National’s automatic defense is generally to default to one of three* deflections;
Blame previous the Labour government
Release story on ‘welfare abuse’
Blame Global Financial Crisis or similar overseas event
There are plenty of past instances of this kind of strategy.