The Labour Party has taken the Government to task over its Job Opportunities Scheme, questioning just how effective it's been in reducing youth unemployment.
The Government announced on Tuesday that it plans to add another 2000 places to the scheme, to keep up with demand.
The scheme, launched in August, creates a six-month work opportunity for low-skilled, unemployed young people and gives their employer a $5,000 government subsidy for six months. It will run until the end of 2010.
Social Development Minister Paula Bennett told Morning Report the Government has had a good response to the scheme, which has created more than 4,000 work opportunities to date.
Ms Bennett says youth unemployment has stabilised at just under 19,500 people - a reflection of the scheme's success, in her view - and the Government has set aside almost $9 million to fund the new places.
But Labour's Annette King is accusing Social Development Minister Paula Bennett of misleading the public.
During question time in Parliament, Ms King said that only about 1,600 young people had actually filled Job Opportunities positions and the number of people on the youth unemployment benefit had gone up by 8,000 in seven months.
Ms bennett replied that the true number was 1,847, not 1,600, and that for the past eight weeks in a row the number of under-24s receving the unemployment benefit had gone down.
The decision to extend the scheme comes as new figures show the overall number of people collecting the unemployment benefit to be dropping.
The figures released on Monday show that in the past seven weeks 1,700 people came off the benefit.
The number of claimants stands at 59,000, which is 23,000 below the Treasury's worst-case scenario forecast.
Two-thirds of those who left the dole queue were young people. Prime Minister John Key says government job schemes have reduced the number of benefit claimants.
Council of Trade Unions secretary Peter Conway says unemployment remains high, though it has stabilised and more job creation schemes are needed.
He says there is little good news in the latest figures and believes Mr Key is being overly optimistic.
"If you want to look at the jobless figure in the Household Labour Force Survey as a more complete measure of all of those impacted," Mr Conway says, "that's over a quarter of a million people.
"So there may be a very small good news story out there, in the sense that it's not as bad as some people thought, but actually it's not really a good story."
ANZ-National Bank chief economist Cameron Bagrie says when the official figures are seasonally adjusted, they show an increase of about 1000.
However, Mr Bagrie says the rate of job losses has slowed and unemployment is unlikely to reach the Treasury's forecast of 8%, or 82,000 people.
