Is that it?

Nobody knows! But since the Greens won't be the government anytime soon, I can make irresponsibly wild guesses with no threat of falsification!

CREDITS

Ending Child Poverty spending ($1.2b): Though this creates few jobs directly, this is high-multiplier stuff.

Guess: +6000 jobs

Clean Rivers spending ($400m): 3000 jobs created directly. The claim that this reaches 8600 if you include upstream effects sounds bullshitty. There's a multiplier, but many of the 3000 would have been employed elsewhere. Let's call it a wash.

Guess: +3000 jobs

Green Jobs spending ($2.6b): A mix of stuff that's low-cost per job (Heat Smart, social housing) and high-cost per job (R&D, clean tech).

Guess: +10,000 jobs (including magical clean tech export jobs)

NEUTRAL

Minimum wage increase: Call this a wash.

DEBITS

Water levy ($1.1b): It's not like people are going to stop using water.

Guess: -1000 jobs

Capital gains tax ($1b): A pretty weak deterrent to work.

Guess: -1000 jobs

Christchurch tax ($3b): This one is the worry. There's no need to pay off the Christchurch debt over five years -- it's a much longer term thing. This may be a relatively easy tax to get the political will to introduce, but it still means consumers have less money in the pocket, and in a demand-based recession, that's devastating.

Guess: -10,000 jobs

Reduced motorway spending ($1.05b): There are good reasons for this. Employment isn't one of them. The notion that we can save $3.5 billion over ten years while keeping the same number of people in work doesn't pass the laugh test.

Guess: -5000 jobs

Phase out ETS subsidies ($1.2b)

Guess : -1000 jobs, but who really knows

TOTAL: +1000 jobs (should've fudged the numbers to make it zero).

Now these are wild guesses. It's quite possible that such a plan could create 20K net jobs, or cost -20K net jobs. But there's no reason to think the plan would get us back to normal levels of unemployment.

The Greens are stuck in the liberal (in the US sense) mirror of austerity: they're more worried about raising revenue than actual job creation. Furthermore, the job creation they do propose is not primarily focused on reducing unemployment. Which I guess shouldn't be surprising -- they are a Green Party. But as someone who used to vote for them because they were a red-green party, it's a wake-up call.