More claim social development benefits during May
Unemployment is at 5.1 percent through May.
Photo:
JES2UFOTO
Latest numbers show 27,243 more people received a benefit in May, compared to the year before.
The Ministry of Social Development's
monthly update shows the number of people on a benefit
in New Zealand rose by just over seven percent to 403,311 in that time.
The unemployment rate is 5.1 percent.
Most of the increase is due to people accessing JobSeeker support - there was an 11 percent rise of just over 21,000, to a total 213,831.
In May, 9.5 percent more people found work, compared to the same time last year, but eight percent more benefits were cancelled than a year ago - a total of just over 6000 - for other reasons, including sanctions.
The Government aims to reduce the number of people on the Jobseeker Support benefit by 50,000 by 2030, introducing a traffic-light system and
new non-financial sanctions
, and changing the re-application for job seekers to every six months, instead of each year.
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RNZ News
3 hours ago
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More managed decline? Or settling on a sustainable structure?
Greg Hywood, chief executive of Fairfax Media and some of the company's top newspapers. CeBIT Australia (CC BY-SA 4.0) CeBIT Australia Photo: CeBIT Australia When Stuff announced it was merging its digital wing with Trade Me last week, things had gone full circle. New Zealand's biggest publisher of news had bought the online marketplace itself in 2006 for more than $700m. Back then it was called Fairfax Media NZ, a subsidiary of the giant Australian news publisher which parted with $1.2 billion to buy the The Press, Dominion Post and Sunday Star Times and others. By 2012, TradeMe was sold off in bits to ease debts and falling revenue. And six years later, Greg Hywood negotiated a merger of Fairfax Media and TV broadcaster Nine Network. It created an Australasian news titan but extinguished the Fairfax name. The email Fairfax staff received as the merger news broke. Photo: screenshot "The best outcome for our journalism, for our employees, our business and of course our shareholders," Greg Hywood said at the time. But the New Zealand publishing - now branded as Stuff - wasn't on the radar at the time. The 95-page merger document only mentioned Fairfax's New Zealand holdings once. And there was no sign of Stuff on a chart showing the logos of the new big beast called Nine Entertainment. Less than two years later, Nine Entertainment sold its apparently unwanted New Zealand branch for just $1 to its chief editor Sinead Boucher. Five years after that, sole owner Boucher is now selling half of Stuff's digital business back to Trade Me. In the same week her former boss in Australia, Greg Hywood, stepped down from his role as chairman of Free TV, the umbrella group for Free to Air TV broadcasting in Australia. Sydney-based Hywood became the ultimate boss of Stuff and its papers here when he rejoined Fairfax Media as CEO in 2010. "Editorially and in the day to day business sense, the organisation did what it needed to do - and frankly it was doing really quite well," Hywood told Mediawatch. "The New Zealand assets were important assets and we kept a close eye on them. They were managed very well. "I was surprised that it was given back for a dollar because I always thought. . the New Zealand business was probably in better shape than the regional business here, which was sold for A$120m by Nine. "Good luck to Sinead and the team with what they've subsequently done." But if Hywood and Boucher had had their way in 2016, the deal could never have happened. Both backed Fairfax Media NZ merging with its big New Zealand rival APN, the publishers of the New Zealand Herald (these days called NZME). They said it was essential for their survival. The plan was knocked back by the Commerce Commission who reckoned it would be too much of a monopoly here. And it would have created one single publisher of news instead of the two we have now - Stuff and NZME - with district editorial approaches offering readers choice. "In retrospect I'm still supportive of it. Ninety percent of the growth in advertising in both New Zealand and Australia goes to Google and Facebook - and traditional media are fighting over the other 10 percent," Hywood said. Fairfax and APN / NZME pursued the process in court for three fruitless years. "You really needed scale to be able to compete and it was a question about diversity or scale. While they have both survived, would they have been able to invest in journalism in the merged entities (more) than what's currently the case? Hywood said. "I can't answer that, but it was a very legitimate exercise to deal with the structural change going on in the industry and making sure that the journalism would survive." "By the time I got back to Fairfax in 2010 as CEO, the consequence of investing so heavily in newspapers had put the company in the position where we had to sell TradeMe to reduce the level of debt. The print revenue was dropping at 10 percent a year, which was $100 million a year," Hywood said. Former All Black captain Divid Kirk was the CEO who bought Trade Me for Fairfax in 2006. "That was a very good decision by David - to digitise the revenue streams of the business," Hywood said. Ads for jobs, homes and cars were the so-called 'rivers of gold' - practically a licence for newspapers to print money - as well as news - in the days before the Internet. Hywood said back in the 1970s Fairfax had its own garage and a staff of mechanics just to service the executives' cars. "Things were great, and were certainly fun... if you were fortunate enough to be a journalist in those days. But there's no point being what I might call an Anzac of the 70s." 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And the government has to provide a fair, and sustainable regulatory environment so that everyone can get on with it." Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero , a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.
NZ Herald
7 hours ago
- NZ Herald
We need to fix the human-shaped hole in our economy
Specifically, I mean the flow of humans across our border. We are a very small country, with a total population the size of Sydney. So, whether it's tourists or immigrants, the fluctuations in the number of people leaving and entering the country have an outsized impact. When the numbers fall dramatically, as they have done, we feel it acutely. There is a human-shaped hole in our economic recovery. We had more good news out of the primary sector last week. A Government report forecast primary sector export earnings will hit $59.9 billion in the June 2025 year – $3b higher than was projected in December. That's a big stimulatory boost on top of already strong earnings. But we had more bad news out of the retail sector. Electronic card transaction data for May showed consumers are still feeling cautious. We should have had more money in our pockets thanks to lower petrol prices and lower interest rates. 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It's probably good for our economy to sweat it out with lower than average net migration for a while. House prices are balancing out, and this provides a chance for infrastructure planning and building to catch up. But we need to turn the trend around soon. We especially need to stop the youngest and brightest Kiwi workers from departing in high numbers. The boom and bust cycles we seem to perpetually swing through are no good for long-term stability. The goal of this Government and the next should be to encourage a steady pace of population growth, perhaps in the range of 30,000-40,000 net gain per year. Liam Dann is business editor-at-large for the New Zealand Herald. He is a senior writer and columnist, and also presents and produces videos and podcasts. He joined the Herald in 2003.
RNZ News
14 hours ago
- RNZ News
More claim social development benefits during May
Unemployment is at 5.1 percent through May. Photo: JES2UFOTO Latest numbers show 27,243 more people received a benefit in May, compared to the year before. The Ministry of Social Development's monthly update shows the number of people on a benefit in New Zealand rose by just over seven percent to 403,311 in that time. The unemployment rate is 5.1 percent. Most of the increase is due to people accessing JobSeeker support - there was an 11 percent rise of just over 21,000, to a total 213,831. In May, 9.5 percent more people found work, compared to the same time last year, but eight percent more benefits were cancelled than a year ago - a total of just over 6000 - for other reasons, including sanctions. The Government aims to reduce the number of people on the Jobseeker Support benefit by 50,000 by 2030, introducing a traffic-light system and new non-financial sanctions , and changing the re-application for job seekers to every six months, instead of each year.
