Trade Skills, Clean Energy and Opportunities Up

But Phil, um, as, uh, TV1 said last night, there was, uh, a glut of policy that, that was released into the mainstream over the weekend.

We had the, uh, the Labor Congress.

I've never understood the difference between a conference and a congress.

Not that it matters too much, I suppose.

Uh, we had the, uh, the ACT party, uh, saying something.

We had New Zealand First introducing Taine Randall and, um, uh, that fellow Nash up in the Hawke's Bays, and then we had the release of all sorts of policy.

So what do you make of the weekend's, uh, events?

Yeah.

Well, it was an interesting weekend, and, uh, I just noticed on the ACT conference, actually was the most interesting thing to me, keep Labor out.

That was the, the big positive [laughs] from the ACT party.

Uh, not about its own policies, but about, um, blocking somebody else.

So I don't know, maybe they've done polling and that showed them that they, they, they might get their vote up in that way.

But, uh, ACT, I think, is a little worried.

It's sitting on about 6 or 7%.

That's not far enough above the margin of error, uh, or the threshold, uh, to, to absolutely guarantee their return to Parliament, though I suspect they will get back.

Um, Labor, let's start with Labor, shall we? Um, I didn't get to the Congress.

Now, Congress, by the way, is what they call it in election year when it's less about formulating policy than it's about, um, uh, advocating policy.

So that was a time when they'd rally the troops, uh, and they'd announce some policy.

Uh, it seemed to go quite well.

I think TV last night said that, uh, Chris Hipkins was on fire, and everybody was enthusiastic, and that's exactly what you expect a, a party conference or congress to be just over four months out from the election.

But their policy announcement was, um, really a, a back to the future one, and I'm not saying that in a critical way.

I think it's a good policy, and that is to, um, to increase the Boost Apprenticeship scheme so that, uh, apprentices would be funded for the first two years of their apprenticeship.

Now, why is that a good idea? Well, it's a good idea because, um, I think we will come out of recession, uh, you know, God and Trump willing, if we don't go back into a war or whatever.

[laughs] Um, and what we'll find when we go back into economic growth is that we've lost a lot of our skilled labor to Australia, and, uh, unsurprisingly, uh, employers haven't been taking on apprentices in the last couple of years.

Now, it takes four years to train an apprentice, so what we'll find as we get back into growth, and one of the, one of the blockages, the obstacles to growth, will be a lack of skilled labor.