Education Minister Chris Hipkins recently appeared before the Education and Workforce select committee to face a barrage of schooling related questions, but with little focus on tertiary education. However, just before his appearance, tertiary education data for 2018 and updated tertiary education forecasts were released, casting some light on the tertiary sector.
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ARTICLES
Improving Māori wellbeing
Lifting the skills and opportunities available for Māori has been one of the key priority areas of the government’s Wellbeing Budget. Plenty has been written about the socio-economic, health and other challenges facing Māori over the past couple of decades, yet many of these interrelated issues remain.
Finding workers to build Dunedin’s hospital
Dunedin is finally getting new hospital, much to the relief of locals! Current estimates put the cost of the new hospital at $1.4bn, with construction scheduled to take place over a six-year period from August 2020 to mid-2026. It will be the largest project in the area in living memory and will require different approaches to get the right mix of workers. In this article we draw on our construction sector and local labour market to examine the opportunities and challenges in store for Dunedin.
Recapping a summer of tourism
All popular opinion seemed to be turning against tourism in the summer of 2017/18. Media stories were dominated with, among others, tales of inconsiderate freedom campers and overcrowding at our most popular spots. Heading into the 2018/19 summer, it seemed as if little had changed, except for a smattering of new public toilets. With international tourism data out now, we’ve looked at how the tourism market performed, with some insights into the coming season based on our knowledge of the tourism sector.
Media Release: Wellbeing in provincial NZ still being neglected
A new report from economic consultancy Infometrics highlights the stark divide in wellbeing between urban and rural New Zealand. Regional Wellbeing marks the first attempt to comprehensively report on wellbeing at a local level around New Zealand. It covers 30 indicators and draws from Infometrics’ online Regional Wellbeing Framework.
Chart of the month: Living in the future
There’s plenty of talk these days about how employment will change in the future, as artificial intelligence (AI) and automation see a decrease in traditional jobs, the emergence of new jobs, and more job transitions. But these forces appear to be sculpting the workforce already.
Giving up on KiwiBuild, but housing’s affordability crisis remains
Fixing New Zealand’s housing affordability crisis was one of Labour’s key policy goals going into the last two elections. But KiwiBuild has been conspicuously absent from the government’s vocabulary in recent months, and yesterday’s Budget was no different. The government might not have given up trying to improve housing affordability, but it seems to have realised that KiwiBuild is not the answer to the problem.
Breaking down the Wellbeing Budget
Today’s Wellbeing Budget is a significant departure from previous budgets. Finance Minister Grant Robertson has laid out an ambitious spending plan for the economy based around the government’s five wellbeing priorities. The test will be how achievable this plan is.
Wellbeing: understanding local progress
All eyes are on wellbeing this week, as Finance Minister Grant Robertson unveils the world’s first wellbeing budget. But the Government has been quiet as to wellbeing differs across New Zealand. At Infometrics we thought this was a massive gap that needed to be filled, so we developed a Regional Wellbeing Framework. This article outlines introduces our Regional Wellbeing Framework and provides a teaser to our forthcoming regional wellbeing report that will be released on 11 June.
Employing the unemployable
New Zealand’s labour market remains tight, with unemployment at 4.2% and businesses finding it difficult to source workers. At the same time, employment growth has slowed, and the Reserve Bank has stated that, in its view, “employment is near its maximum sustainable level”.