By Duncan Garner
The Government has thrown over $1 billion at Christchurch and Canterbury since the earthquakes.
Labour says if the Government doesn’t extend its welfare package further, tens of thousands of Cantabrians face being forced onto the dole.
Merv Arnesen ran a show shop that was destroyed in the earthquake and he’s been on the Government’s welfare rescue package since.
There are few signs of jobs, and he’s not happy.
As of this afternoon:
67,139 workers had signed up to the Government’s emergency welfare package – they’re out of work.
It has cost $160 million so far.
But that package runs out in seven weeks and Labour thinks at least 20,000 workers – one third of those on the welfare package – will get dumped into the dole queue.
“[Prime Minister John Key] promised no one would be worse off. Well, this is the acid test of the promise because we will have significant numbers on the dole if this package is not extended,” says Labour MP Clayton Cosgrove.
Speaking on TV3’s The Nation at the weekend, Earthquake Recovery Minister Gerry Brownlee didn’t dispute the figures.
“We just don’t know,” he said.
But Mr Key is disputing it.
“I don’t think there is any credibility in the numbers that Clayton Cosgrove has pulled out of the air,” he says.
Mr Key accepts the job losses will come, but he just won’t put a figure on it.
“I think we need to accept that there will be a bulge because people’s home and possessions are in Christchurch and their kids are in schools – but their jobs have gone,” he says.
Mr Arnesen says he wants the Government to continue to help.
At this stage, Mr Key says, the welfare rescue package won’t be extended in its current form.
The Government is looking at what it can do once it ends next month.
But 67,000 workers on the package is more than the capacity of the new revamped Eden Park. To suggest they’ll all get work in this depressed economy is unlikely, and the numbers of those on the dole are expected to blow out.
3 News