Construction trainees in Christchurch

Dave Guerin at Education Directions blogs:

Labour’s Phil Goff and Clayton Cosgrove have criticised the Government over the plummeting number of building and construction trainees in Canterbury. Unfortunately their claims don’t stand up to basic analysis and were published a few days after the ITO announced that Canterbury construction trainees were shooting up! Labour has been a weak Opposition over tertiary education issues and it would be better for the country if they gave the Government a harder time than in this latest effort.

Dave quotes Cosgrove:

“When National came into office at the end of 2008, there were 1049 building and construction industry trainees in Canterbury,” Clayton Cosgrove said. “Two years later, in December 2010, the number dropped 45 per cent to 578. That’s staggering.

Guerin points out:

I’m grumpy that Labour put out such a ridiculous media release that paid no attention to the fact that the building industry had crashed over the last few years (and employment in general had also declined). They didn’t even bother checking their figures against, say, Statistics NZ. The chart below is drawn from Stats NZ’s report on Value of Building Work Put In Place, March 2011 and it shows how much work has actually been done each quarter on approved building consents (in Sep 1999 prices). As you can see, the figures plunged from December 2007, with a small rally from late 2009 to mid 2010. The December quarter figures for the trend value are $2,413m (07), $2,015 (08), $1,789 (09) and $1,885 (10). Even allowing for the uptick in 2010, there was a 22% decline in the value of work completed from Dec 2007 to Dec 2010. From Dec 2007 to Dec 2009, there was a 26% drop.

In other words if there is less work, there are less apprenticeships etc.

I could publish figure from BCITO’s 2010 annual report (p. 17) that shows that BCITO figures started plummeting from Dec 2007, when Labour was in power.

So the downward trend started under Labour.

it is pretty dopey to put out a claim that the situation is disastrous, when less than a week beforehand BCITO announced that there had been well over 300 trainee sign-ups since January 2011 in Canterbury, higher than anywhere else in the country, with 153 trainees in May and June alone. Labour’s figures had 578 trainees in Canterbury at Dec 2010, so the increase is significant. (I also understand that provider-based trades enrolments are up a lot at CPIT.) It is unbelievable that Labour didn’t bother checking out the BCITO’s website before putting out their release, let alone calling the BCITO or simply reading the news.

Or they did, but ignored the inconvenient facts.

My overall concern isn’t a partisan one. I’d like Labour to be doing a better job as an Opposition because it would make the Government work harder on its policy. But this latest media release by Clayton Cosgrove, with Phil Goff commenting in support, is just shoddy. Tertiary spokesperson David Shearer was lucky to keep out of it.