Hon GRANT ROBERTSON (Minister of Finance): Mr Speaker—yep, I'll go for it. The strength of the jobs market is continuing to support the New Zealand economy. Last week, Statistics New Zealand reported that the unemployment rate fell from 3.3 percent in the September quarter to a record low of 3.2 percent in the December quarter, the number of unemployed fell by 5,000 to 93,000, and the unemployment rate is 34 percent lower than a year ago and 14 percent below where it was in the pre-COVID December 2019 quarter. On comparable measures, New Zealand's unemployment rate, at 3.2 percent, stands against 4.6 percent in Australia, 4.1 percent in the UK, 4.2 percent in the US, 6.2 percent in Canada, and the OECD average of 5.5 percent. The robust jobs market shows that the Government's actions in response to COVID-19 to protect lives and livelihoods has proven to be the best economic approach as well as the best health approach. 