The Post: Why are we cutting programmes that get young people into work?

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You would think that, at a time when youth unemployment is higher than it’s been this century, the government would be straining every sinew to help young adults find work.

So I was all the more puzzled – distressed, indeed – to learn that an apparently successful work-skills scheme has just been shut down. The closure, and the manner in which it happened, tells us much about the failures of the modern state.

It was, Nicky Austin told me over the phone, a “devastating” result for her Katikati community, tucked away between Tauranga and Waihi Beach. I’d first met Austin last year when my think-tank, IDEA, was researching a welfare-to-work report that we ended up calling The Pipeline of Potential.

Austin was helping run the Katikati branch of a nationwide scheme, He Poutama Rangatahi, its name referencing the stepped “pathway to heaven” often seen in tukutuku panels. Her Poutama programme gave wraparound employment support to 16-to-24-year-olds at risk of “going down the wrong track”, in her words. Mentoring, mental health support, life skills, training referrals, interview prep, work placements: whatever was needed, Austin’s team did it.

The programme was a loving one, but not a soft touch. Austin didn’t have my innate liberal aversion to benefit sanctions, and refused to entertain any notion that there mightn’t be jobs going in her area. The Mount Maunganui packhouses alone were employing “dozens” of forklift drivers, she told me firmly.

The far greater problem was the “terrifying” lack of understanding of what work actually meant, for young people who’d grown up with perennially unemployed parents, in addict households, raised by older siblings. “The idea of going into work – they have just got absolutely no idea what that involves: how that feels, how to achieve that, what it might mean.”

All the more remarkable, then – in the best sense of the word – that the Poutama programme had got four-fifths of its struggling young adults into work or vocational courses. Austin’s staff placed people with local earthworks contractors, got previously illiterate young men into security jobs, generally hustled for their charges: “life-changing” work, as she called it.

All the more remarkable, then – in the worst sense of the word – that on May 26, Austin was told the scheme would end on June 30. The Ministry for Social Development was maintaining its nationwide funding for He Poutama Rangatahi – but, faced with a deluge of other applications, had chosen not to renew the Katikati scheme.

The ministry now says it’s funding providers in Tauranga instead. But, as Austin points out, that’s a 90-minute round-trip from Katikati, and local youth often lack a driver’s licence. That’s why Austin’s team had made a point of picking them up, and dropping them off, every day.

The rejection wasn’t necessarily the ministry’s fault. Something else I discovered researching The Pipeline of Potential– which is what jobseekers are, by the way – was that we spend half as much as the average developed country on welfare-to-work schemes.

Half the typical nation’s investment, at a crucial transition in people’s lives, when support can make all the difference. It’s madness.

But when our government is obsessed with cutting spending to the arbitrary figure of 30% of GDP, there’s no room to put the madness right. Even the opposition don’t seem to feel the urgency: inspiring policy launches have been in short supply.

Adding insult to injury, the ministry won’t explain its decision, leaving Austin with “absolutely no idea” why her scheme was scrapped. “Tell me what we were doing wrong”, she says; she could have made changes.

But this is what it’s like to deal with government in the 21st century. You can, to the best of your knowledge, be successfully delivering an initiative for the state – and have it swept away with five weeks’ notice and zero explanation. One of the most basic elements of the democratic process – an account of why a decision was made – is absent. It oughtn’t be allowed: and yet it is.

So where does this leave Austin – and the young people she served? “I worry for them,” she says. “They have no support other than our staff. For our town, and the wider surrounds, there’s no other [comparable] programme.”

Since the axe came down, she’s had to turn away several young people wanting to join a scheme that no longer exists. “I don’t know what’s going to become of them,” she says.

But she does often drive that 90-minute Katikati-to-Tauranga round trip. Along the way, some of those she sees working on the roads, building roundabouts and the like, are people Poutama placed with a local firm, HEB Construction.

Those young adults were “absolutely over the moon” when they got their jobs. But now, she says, “I look at those kids as I drive past most days and I think, ‘What would have happened to you if it hadn’t been for Poutama?’ And then I just see a void.”