Hon CARMEL SEPULONI (Minister for Social Development and Employment): I'm not going to lie: I breathed a sigh of relief when the household labour force survey was released today and we saw that, yet again, unemployment has dropped and we are now down to 4.7 percent. These are not easy times globally and many countries are struggling with respect to job losses, businesses are struggling with the pandemic around them, and of course that creates a range of other social issues. Earlier last year, when we were first hit with this pandemic, we had an incredibly bleak outlook. I think at its worst it was forecast that New Zealand would experience benefit numbers up to 490,000. But, instead, what we've seen already is since mid-January, those numbers on benefit have dropped by 30,000—from 390,000 people on benefit to 361,000—and we will continue to watch that space. 