20,000 jobs forecast — 11,740 so far

WELLINGTON: A regional mayor says the Government’s forecast of 20,000 new jobs through its multibilliondollar shovelready projects scheme always seemed too good to be true.

Before last year’s election, the Government announced it would pump $2.6 billion into more than 150 shovelready projects to create jobs to kickstart the country’s Covid19 rebuild.

Preelection, Finance Minister Grant Robertson touted a forecast that 20,000 jobs would result from the package.

But, in response to written parliamentary questions by Opposition MP Louise Upston, Mr Robertson said the forecast was for 11,740 jobs, a drop of more than 8000.

One ‘‘shovelready’’ project is Te Kuiti’s new sports stadium.

The project value is $3.5 million and the amount funded is $500,000.

Waitomo Mayor John Robertson said the project was yet to break ground.

‘‘It hasn’t started. It’s still in the completion of a business plan process.’’

He believed the initial forecast always seemed farfetched.

‘‘The concept that you could put billions of dollars into communities through New Zealand and expect immediate, shovelready results on big infrastructure projects was a concept that really had a lot of risks.’’

‘‘They need design, engineers, some of the skills were overseas . . . and so to get the stimulus for local communities to suddenly get employment it was somewhat unrealistic to expect jobs to be suddenly created in such quick time.’’

There was some doubt in local government circles the shovelready scheme could deliver on promises like job creation, he said.

In his response, Mr Robertson said he did not believe the 20,000 jobs forecast was misleading.

‘‘The initial number was simply adding up what all of the outside parties who had proposed projects to us said would be the number of jobs.

‘‘When we do the due diligence, the final contracting, we come up with the final number.

‘‘That was a number based on the projects we had approved in principle, given by other people.’’

Ms Upston said the lower number of 11,740 were not necessarily new fulltime jobs for people who were not previously working.

‘‘When you start to dig into it some of the jobs are for consultants and engineers and people who are already in work as opposed to the intention of this jobs plan.

‘‘[The] 20,000 new jobs was aimed at supporting people who had lost jobs to get into work with the shovelready initiative.’’

Mr Robertson said Crown Infrastructure Partners had done its own due diligence on how many fulltime positions would be created by the shovelready projects. It was 10 months after the 20,000 jobs forecast was in headlines when the significantly lower forecast was discovered.