Apopulation strategy please

per cent of those one million extra households.

An additional 30 per cent of the increase came from families becoming smaller. The number of people per household has reduced over time, from around 4 people in 1961 to 2.7 people in 2013.

The remaining 9 per cent of the demand came from net migration.

It is not the scale of the demand that is the issue, rather the cycle and sudden changes.

There are two broad issues with immigration.

The first is the issue of population migration. It is for many a taboo subject, even though migration has been at the core of New Zealand’s history.

New Zealand has no clearly articulated population strategy: we do not know how big a population we want, or why and how to manage migration to get there.

As a result, immigration is the topic of much discussion, but always without a guiding principle of what we are trying to achieve with it. We urgently need a policy discussion about a population strategy that sets out how many people we want and how immigration fits within it.

The second issue is that housing supply is slow to respond to rapid changes in population (which are usually driven by migration cycles).

The policy response to this must look at what could be done to speed up housing supply, spanning issues around land supply, infrastructure, infill, building, consenting and inspecting.

We need to be careful about understanding which policies to pursue, who to bring to the country and who to stop entering the country and how.

The surge in net migration in recent years is very good case in point. The acceleration in net migration has been driven by, in descending order of importance, fewer people leaving New Zealand for Australia, more New Zealanders coming back from Australia, more people arriving on work visas (usually to fill skill vacancies), and more students.

If we are to use immigration policies to reduce net migration, presumably it will be to reduce those segments that are rising the most.

Since we cannot deny New Zealanders entry or force them to leave for Australia, this has to mean reducing the numbers of workers, students and residents coming into the country. We seem to rely on migrants to fill the deficiencies in our education and training, leading to persistent skills shortages across a number of sectors.

We are also addicted to population growth to pay for unfunded fiscal promises like universal health and super that cannot be paid for with a dwindling pool of taxpayers.

In general, New Zealand has a long history of migration and societal change, and has accepted and adapted to changes in our ethnic and cultural make-up.

But we lack a clearly articulated population strategy and, consequently, a clearly articulated immigration policy.

We need to talk about immigration openly. Not through the lenses of envy and racism, but through a reasoned and deliberate discussion on why we want immigration, how many people we want and what kind of people we want.

Having a clearly articulated strategy on population, whatever that may be, would create a common base for all of us to work from.