New Zealand Government speech on the global report of the Director General - Working Out of Poverty

9 June 2003

May I first warmly welcome the re-election of our distinguished Director-General. As a deputy member of the Governing body since the Director General's appointment, the New Zealand Government has been committed to providing support and guidance to you in your efforts to reform and revitalise the ILO. We welcome the opportunity to work with you through your second term as you seek to further operationalise decent work at national and local levels.

My Government is committed to ensuring that the conditions of decent work that the ILO has articulated over the past three years are available to all New Zealanders. In this context, I am delighted to announce that New Zealand has now ratified ILO core Convention 98 on The Right to Organise and Collective Bargaining. The relationship with trade unions and employer organisations in New Zealand is a valued partnership and my Government supports the right of workers to achieve decent work outcomes and raise issues of concern through collective activity.

This brings me to the report that we are here to discuss today, Working out of Poverty, which provides a practical operational review of ILO activity in the area of poverty reduction and eradication. The terrible toll that poverty is taking in the modern world is starkly revealed through the report. I commend the Director General for showing with such clarity the complexity of issues surrounding poverty and the centrality of decent work to any solutions.

My government is proactively working with New Zealand communities to combat poverty and has identified decent work as a key means of achieving this goal. The New Zealand Department of Labour, for example, through its Community Employment Group works to achieve social and economic prosperity through local employment and enterprise development. Innovative schemes include the Community Enterprise Organisation initiative, which has allowed 60 - 70 communities throughout New Zealand to develop community enterprise initiatives during the last three years.

The New Zealand Government is committed to poverty eradication not only at home but also more broadly, with a particular commitment to working with our neighbours in the Pacific. The mission of the New Zealand Agency for International Development (NZAID) is to eliminate poverty through effective development partnerships with the vision of achieving a safe and just world free of poverty. Much of New Zealand's assistance is channelled into education and training programmes aimed at giving individuals the opportunity to achieve decent work, with the ultimate objective of poverty eradication.

It is heartening to note that Working out of Poverty appears to be building on the initiatives that came out of the Thirteenth Asia Regional Meeting in which I was involved. One of the outcomes of the Regional Meeting was a proposal for the development of National Plans of Action for Decent Work. My government is currently working on such a plan for New Zealand. This plan overlaps and is consistent with our National Plan of Action for Human Rights in New Zealand which is an outcome of the Vienna World Conference on Human Rights held in 1993.

My government is also pleased by the support that the 286th Governing Body has given to these plans through approving funding for a ILO Tripartite East Asian and Pacific Forum on Decent Work. The New Zealand government has agreed to host this forum in October this year. The forum is about taking forward the vision of decent work through sharing practical strategies to achieve decent work on a country by country basis.

In conclusion, the New Zealand Government endorses the connection drawn in Working out of Poverty between achieving decent work and the eradication of poverty. We support the Director -General's vision of practical, local, and national agendas of activity to eradicate poverty. We commend the Director General and the ILO for their ongoing global programmes of activity aimed at