Helping young people into better and brighter futures
Our Government wants every New Zealander to have the chance to succeed – and that includes young people who need a little bit of extra support to get back on the right track.
That’s why we’re stepping up pathways to better opportunities, by supporting more young people into jobs and training to prevent them getting involved in crime.
A pathway to better opportunities
This week we released our Better Pathways package, which extends programmes that have a record of success in helping young New Zealanders into better futures, and driving down youth crime.
All of the programmes that we’re scaling up, including He Poutama Rangatahi and the Ākonga Fund, play slightly different roles – ranging from helping people into education, training and employment, to more general wrap-around support. But they are all working successfully to help at-risk young people turn their lives around.
Young offending is down on where it was a decade ago, and we will continue to build on the programmes that work so that we break the cycle of crime for more young New Zealanders.
Breaking the cycle of crime
On top of this investment in new opportunities for at-risk young people, we’re also increasing the consequences of gang and criminal activity
To crack down on offending, we’re changing the law to give police greater powers to seize gang assets to make sure that crime doesn’t pay.
These changes build on our strong law and order record which includes delivering New Zealand’s largest ever Police service, targeting illegal firearms, as well as our work to break the cycles of offending.
While we’ve seen a reduction in youth offending, there has been a recent spike in ram raids. To support small businesses, we moved quickly to introduce new measures to help them protect against this criminal activity. You can learn more, here.
Supporting more New Zealanders to upskill
It’s not just at-risk young people that are benefitting from our focus on education, training and jobs. Right across the country, we’re creating jobs, helping people into work and supporting more New Zealanders to upskill.
More than 200,000 people have now benefitted from our free apprenticeships and trades training programmes.
We also recently reached the milestone of 50,000 New Zealanders through Apprenticeship Boost, which supports employers keep and take on new apprentices
This is really important as we know that without initiatives like these, we risk losing our apprentices and facing a massive skills shortage, as happened after the Global Financial Crisis.
The latest figures also show that unemployment has remained at near record lows thanks to our economic approach that support families and businesses, resulting in more people in work and rising wages.
You can learn more about how we’re supporting Kiwis into work and training, here.
Our Government will continue to work hard to provide all New Zealanders with the opportunities to succeed
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