Goff’s record on jobs

Fran O’Sullivan reminded me on Saturday that Phil Goff was Minister of Employment from 1984 to 1990. I had forgotten this. I just remembered Phil as the man who introduced higher tertiary fees.

So everytime Phil Goff goes on about how the Government is not doing enough to reduce unemployment, we should look at how Phil did as Minister of Employment. And of course Phil did not have a global recession as a factor to deal with.

The Household Labour Force Survey only started in 1986, so we’ll compare 1986 to the end of 1990.

Well Phil managed to preside over the destruction of 97,000 jobs – falling from 1,623,000 to 1,526,000. Unemployment doubled from 71,000 to 150,000 – in percentage terms going from 4.2% to 8.9%.