After Labour leader David Shearer's speech yesterday in Christchurch, the home of Mr Brownlee, on employment in training Mr Brownlee said Mr Shearer would have difficulty finding a place to scaremonger about jobs because job availability was improving throughout New Zealand.
However, the ANZ Job Ads series, which summed up newspaper and internet ads, fell 2.9% in September (seasonally adjusted) after a 0.6% rise in August. Canterbury job ads continued to trend higher. Other regions remained flat. The monthly fall was driven by both a 2.4% in internet job ads and a 5.9% fall in newspaper listings. The composite total, which weighted newspaper ads more heavily to give a better indicator for the unemployment rate, fell 4%.
Auckland total job ads fell 3.6% in September. In Wellington they fell 2.2%. Job ads in Waikato and Otago fell by more than the national newspaper average, down 16.4% and 9.1% respectively.
"Canterbury remains the outlier. Canterbury newspaper ads rose 5.9% and internet ads by 0.3% with total ads up 1.9%," ANZ senior economist Sharon Zolliner said.
The Otago Daily Times is one of the newspapers included in the month survey.
