Update: Brian Fallow of the NZ Herald agrees that online job advertising has been overlooked.

The NZ Herald reports that there are 8% fewer vacancies in July compared to 12 months earlier (Department of Labour survey). The results were collated from newspapers and two IT websites.

However they didn’t look at job ads on Trademe. Maybe the authors don’t understand the impact of Trademe on the job market (they have over 4,100 jobs at the moment compared to 6,351 recorded by the survey). It would be interesting to know how many jobs are advertised on Trademe and not in newspapers - more and more I suspect!

Much of the debate on bus reregulation has focused on whether operators or councils should decide who can operate buses in a particular location, to what standard and for what price. But why is it that we hear repeated calls for reregulation of “vital” bus services and not for (even more vital) food retailers like Tesco? What is different about buses that means they are subject to a perpetual tug of war between pro- and anti-regulators?

I wrote an article in Transit Magazine published in June. It suggests that buses are a monopoly and so the solution applied to network monopolies are appropriate (i.e. “unbundling”). Smart cards available over the whole network are one way that this could be achieved.