So, ladies and gentleman, as I have welcomed you here under our mountain, Tararua, from where flow the rivers, the tears of our ancestors, the Manawatu, I welcome you here on behalf of our Rangatira, Tanenuiarangi o Te Awe Awe and our people, the Rangitane. Welcome today to this very special hui and I am sure at the end of the day it will be a fruitful one for all. So without further ado, Welcome, welcome, welcome.

I add my very warm words of welcome to those of Bob Hina, and I thank you for ensuring that this day, this day of working together for employment, starts in such an appropriate manner.

The importance of this day is seen with the numbers of you that are here today and the range of sectors represented and the positions that you hold, and I am delighted to see the Council Chamber looking as if it is going to be overflowing with people.

This is a day of challenge and a day of opportunities. We are all very aware of the impact of employment and unemployment on the individual, the family, communities and society as a whole and I want to say congratulations to those of you who have put so much work into organising today to say "Right, we can do it at the local level!" because the answers come at all levels but this local level is the key area where we should be looking at what we can do.

At the end of the day I am anticipating that we will all go away saying, "this is what we can and will do!" There will be a little bit of "this is what they should do" but I am anticipating that most of it will be "this is what we can do", either as individuals or groups within the groups here today or the conference as a whole. I am going to hand over now to Steve Maharey MP who is going to be facilitating this morning, and I will be facilitating this afternoon.

These are complex issues and I am looking forward to a great day of meeting challenges head on and seizing opportunities. Thank you.

We are in for a very exciting day. We are sitting a little formally so I want you to settle into your seats and look around the room as we start off the conference for today because you are the real glitterati for the area of jobs and employment. You will see we have got people from Councils, from Enterprise Boards, people who have been involved in exciting events like the John Hornblow events around the city, there are political candidates, you’ve got Rod Donald from the Green Party¸ people from domestic backgrounds, people from government organisations.

This is the place to be today if you care about jobs. So make sure you look around the room, see who is here. Don't stick with the people you came with. Do some heavy networking during the day so that you leave with a real range of views from the people who are here. It is a rare event to have such a cross-section of people here in the same room.

This conference poses one simple question that says: "Employment -what can we do?" Us, present, meeting here. I like this question, because what it asks us is something which I think is really a move that could be called a mega-trend in societies like our own. That move is for communities to take more responsibility for things that affect their own future. It's as simple as that. I think the days of the State telling us what to do are over, we don't want it, it's not going to do it anyway. I think the days of the market telling us what we want to do are over, it hasn't worked, it didn't work 100 years ago and it didn't work this time either. So where do we go from here?

This simple question is answered by - US. It doesn't mean just saying, "the State won't do anything any more," it just is that we have to tell it what to do more often; what's good for our community. What happens here in the Manawatu should be largely defined by people like ourselves in this room and then we make use of the resources the State has got to offer to get growth and get those jobs going.

To the same question, business needs to have a partnership, a healthy partnership with its local community, so locals support business and business supports the local community. That's the way forward.

So that simple question of "What we can do?" says something very very large about the way things are moving in societies like ours, towards you and I making decisions and working together so that we can get growth in jobs in our own particular region.

That means that everybody in this room today can see themselves as what we might call civic and social entrepreneurs. You are people who lead the community. You don't just work for a business or an agency, you don't just focus on what you can do by making a success with your own organisation, the question you are constantly asking yourself is "How can I bring the University here with the Council?" "How can I get all the folks into the middle of town on New Years Eve so they can be part of that quality of life and be part of the city?" "How can the Council bring together community groups so they can work with business?" You're constantly working, as many of you now do, to try and bring people together to get solutions that will give us jobs.

And that is what I hope we will think about as we go on through today - thinking about how you, in the community, working together can make that kind of difference about jobs because that is where the jobs are going to come from, us working together, in that way, and making use of the resources of the State and of business, coming together for the community to grow.

Now we have got some very exciting people here today, who are going to help lead us through this discussion.