Thank you for your welcome. Coming from Taranaki I greet your mountain and your river.

It is difficult for me to stand here and say that unemployment is still the major social issue in this country. I often wish that the efforts of many of the people in this room would have stacked up to have made more of a difference than they have today. I'm not saying that to put down the tremendous work that has been happening here, all the work that we have collaborated in, but the fact of the matter is that unemployment still stands as one of the major issues in this country and we are not doing enough about it. Either at the local level or at all our different strata.

Unemployment is still the major reason for poverty in this country. It is still the major reason why people are homeless and in ill health, that people are having trouble with their education and also to the lack of security that many people are finding in their homes. It all comes back to this one major social issue.

Unemployment was what the Prime Minister's Task Force said in 1994 was New Zealand's greatest challenge. Unfortunately, since that time we no longer have a Minister of Employment. We've had in recent years the destruction of the NZ Employment Service as it has been absorbed into the Department of Work and Income and we've lost many talents as they have started the restructuring process. And the Task Force goal, announced in 1994, "that no New Zealander would be out of work for over six months, they would either be in work or training" has not been achieved as we approach the year 2000.

There is a tremendous need for meetings such as this today.

Some of us were involved in the Hikoi of Hope, and the theme of creating real jobs was at the front of the Hikoi. I want to say that who would have imagined 20 years ago that New Zealand's largest religious denomination would have been walking from one end of the country to the other to demonstrate about the issue of poverty. It would have been unimaginable. It would have been unbelievable to have actually thought to see that a former Governor General would be standing on Parliament grounds leading a chant saying, "Enough is Enough!"

This is the New Zealand that we have inherited, from really a series of non-actions and non-effectiveness on this particular issue over the past 20 years. We've never talked about an issue such as poverty nearly as freely as we do in this country today, and it is such an urgent part of our landscape that we really need to address and I am crying out for much more action.

When I first started working in this field in the 1970's, unemployment was actually considered an aberration. We were concerned about the effects of new technology. We were concerned about what we could see was starting to happen in terms of the global economy, and we though t we had time to do something sensible about it. At that time in the early 80's there were committees setting up everywhere, in this area in the Manawatu, particularly the work of Ian Ritchie, were leaders in that particular field. Within a few years there were committees in every town across New Zealand focused on the issue of unemployment and what we could do. When the Labour Government got into power in 1984, unemployment was officially declared a crisis. At that time we only had 50,000 people unemployed. In real terms we have over 200,000 these days.

Somehow, in the fabric of our political culture we no longer consider it a crisis in the way New Zealand did in 1984. At that time there was an Employment Summit, held at Parliament in the Beehive. The call went out, "There is no way we are going to face this deep issue that we know so much about already, unless the different sectors of our community start to work together". That was the call in 1984.

It has been the challenge ever since that day. A challenge to our ability to really work effectively. Because if we are telling the truth to each other, unemployment is not on the political agenda today. If it was, I am sure there would still be a Minister of Employment. Unemployment has become an accepted part of our economic framework. It is seen as an integral part of a competitive market economy in which there will be winners and losers, and that is somehow seen as a proper way to do things.

We are the only species on the planet that has unemployment. The whole idea of people as waste is a purely human attribute and I must say that I find it completely unnatural and we have actually got to see it in those sorts of terms.

What we've seen in the 1990's is that community groups, those committees that existed everywhere on unemployment, have reinvented themselves to become contractors to government departments in terms of the delivery of social services. The government and government departments have restructured themselves, sometimes out of existence and particularly in the last 18 months on this particular issue. In the meantime, large businesses have continued to downsize, continued to discard people in the name of economic efficiencies. That is clearly the situation we have before us.

I started talking here in the Manawatu on this issue, believe it or not, back in the early 1980's. Don't get me wrong. I've seen so much good work that has happened on this issue. Many of you have been doing tremendous work, just see the tremendous pride and effectiveness of many of the social services. When I go and speak to managers of government departments or the leaders of different community groups about what they are doing they show me their business plans, their key performance indicators and their outcomes and I can see that it is actually working a lot more efficiently. But when I sit down and talk more privately with these people they are sharing a different story. They are sharing a story about their fears for the future of their children in the working world, they are sharing the story of their fears for what we are leaving to the next generation, and to me these people, despite the official propaganda if you like of what is actually happening in our buoyant economy, these people are not walking on sunshine. They are looking to a future they know will not be producing enough jobs for people and that a significant part of our community will be slipping into joblessness, homelessness, despair and bitterness. It is incumbent on us to do something about it and face that issue.

Now much of the information I am sure that you are going to hear today is not actually new. The challenge isn't for new information; the challenge for us isn't for new ideas or new creativity. The challenge before us, from my perspective, is our capacity to meet this information and our capacity to actually work together to come up with practical, pragmatic ways in which we can embrace what I call, the 'future of work'. That's why I think committees such as the Local Employment Co-ordination groups are so important to this picture.

I don't believe there is anyone in control of this particular issue or pretends they can be. I think that the motivation for where the solutions to these problems is going to be driven from is in a hundred different areas with a hundred different people actually working together. I am sure that as the day progresses, we will start to share those stories around this room of what we can actually do about it.

As you can see, this is a very good overview of the sorts of issues that we are faced with today.

I thought of the title of this conference "Employment - what can we do?" I suggest that one of the challenges that also needs to be addressed is - Why what we have done over the last 20 years hasn't made as much a difference as we would have wished? Why is that so? And I think that Jeremy Rifkin starts to point to the fact that perhaps if we try and solve our employment problems at the same level as those problems we are just going to go round in circles. He is suggesting that we are really facing a paradigm shift, in the place of work and income in our culture.

During the break I was asked a question by the reporter here of just that. "Why do you think it has not worked over the last 20 years or hasn't been effective in meeting the challenges that are in front of us?" Where I am at today is that I have to tell my own truth as I am seeing it at the moment, because I think unemployment is not a mistake of an economic system, it is the consequential expression of a system that is serving other goals. And we have to have the maturity as a community to be able to address each other about the substance of those goals.

We need to take leadership to see the jobs of the future that are going to emerging from the third sector. That sector is not driven by the market opportunities of desire. It is driven by our ability as a community to value different things. That is an act of leadership that each one of us in this room needs to start taking and I believe the jobs will start to follow.