Migrant tap hard to turn off

If you’re in Wellington and drop to your knees, placing an ear against the pavement outside Parliament, you may pick up a faint but intriguing new noise. It could be described as the sound of a once-efficient and productive machine beginning to unspool, or maybe a train threatening to jump its tracks.

This Government has made a number of missteps of late. There was the unseemly sight of its Speaker attempting to put a sorry political episode behind him, but then relitigating the whole affair and offending many in the process.

Then the Government appeared to alienate many of its traditional allies in a poorly communicated public sector pay freeze.

Now it is risking another one with its vague aspiration to turn down the tap on temporary and skilled migrant workers, and reduce our reliance on migration.

It is a commendable goal: this country and its infrastructure have certainly struggled under the weight of so many arrivals over the past decade, and that reliance has meant that traditional labour-market muscles have been weakened through under-use, even in the primary industries that helped define who we are.

But the ambition, without supporting legislation and other key initiatives to ensure its success, ignores a number of inconvenient but very important truths.

New Zealand is not only reliant on migrants, it would go backwards without them. Massey University sociologist Paul Spoonley points out that, pre-Covid, between 150,000 and 170,000 people entered this country each year as permanent migrants, with another 300,000 here in a temporary capacity.

That has helped to offset a declining birth rate. StatsNZ figures show it was just 1.6 in 2020, a record low and far less than the 2.1 that academics claim is required to keep the population growing and the economy ticking over. And the decrease is the most marked in our most populous cities.

Australia and Canada have similar birth rates, and both predict migrants will be their sole source of population growth in the next couple of decades.

Those migrating here have played a part in pushing up our housing prices, but they are also a key part of the plan to build more homes and slow down those rising prices. Beyond the building sites, they make up one-third of the workforce in elder care and our fishing industry.

They are also essential workers in healthcare and IT, even in the rural sector. This country, so long a self-sufficient agriculture stronghold, now needs migrants to work its orchards and farms; they make up close to half the workforce on South Island dairy farms and, still, industry leaders bemoan a critical labour shortage.

Those and many other industries will rightly ask: where are these workers going to come from? Not enough people are being trained for these roles, and their low pay and status make them unattractive anyway.

In our rural centres, schools, medical centres, banks and other key infrastructure have long since closed, pushing more people to our cities for work.

Some have gone even further afield, west to where there is golden soil and genuine wealth for toil. That is likely to increase, given that Australia has its own labour shortage to address and the travel bubble is open.

Such domestic gaps might be closed with more support for training and higher pay, but these things take time. And they need a clear, detailed plan. Without such things, ambitious goals, no matter how meritorious, are meaningless.