Regions flex their muscle on migration
The Government of the day does tend to portray changes to immigration settings as a matter of exquisite delicacy.
A continuing process of finely calibrated tinkering to keep sorelyneeded talent and willing workers coming into the country without shutting out job-seeking New Zealanders.
Policies that require the precision of jeweller watchmakers. The thing is, refined watchmaker metaphors tend to prove fragile at the best of times; never moreso than in an election year when the view that the settings have been significantly, not subtly, out of whack has been getting real traction.
The Government’s most recently proposed recalibration, while criticised from some directions as still too tentative, has also been drawing fire from the opposite direction. Too tight, too restrictive. That view has been especially strong in the provinces, where the latest proposals struck many as having been calibrated for Auckland’s situation rather than their own.
Maybe. But it may also have been the case that the Government was giving weight to concerns Treasury raised less than two years ago, about lower-skilled migrants shutting out local workers and stopping wages from growing. In any case these were interpreted as tougher rules and the regions saw them as sorely in need of tenderising.
They had the necessary political clout to require that. Prime Minister Bill English has acknowledged a lot of pushback and ‘‘a bit of concern some of the rules might be a bit tight’’. So we have been told to expect changes. Even New Zealand First, which wants drastic reduction in net immigration, has supported calls for a rethink, on the grounds that the Government was getting tough in all the wrong places.
Winston Peters contends immigration’s biggest problems are in Auckland, not out on the farms, which he acknowledges need workers.
As he tells it, the farmers can’t afford to hire New Zealanders because of the economy the Government has created. Not everyone will buy the ‘‘can’t afford’’ line, figuring instead that it’s more likely farmers are paying as little as they have to, rather than as much as they can. And that, in itself, is a line of thinking that presupposes a pool of willing and adept Kiwi workers, which is itself at least a tad contestable, at least in regions like Southland with low unemployment.
Last election, Immigration Minister Michael Woodhouse was stumping around saying he doubted some parties believed their own immigration rhetoric. He said it was very easy for them to bang the immigration drum during the campaign, but that was a lot different from actually changing well-placed policy settings.
Confidence in those well-placed settings hasn’t particularly grown during the past three years.
Fairfax NZ