Everything’s going Winston’s way
That sound National ministers keep hearing behind them? It’s Winston Peters breathing down their necks.
The heavy breathing would have gone up the Richter scale with two figures out this week.
The first was a Roy Morgan poll putting Peters at 10.5 per cent support.
A caution here. Both Labour and National will tell you they don’t put too much stock in the Morgan poll, as its numbers can move around a lot. But over time it is a useful indicator of trends. And Peters is definitely trending.
His numbers are particularly significant because Peters has a history of finishing strongly As the Morgan poll notes, in 2011 NZ First averaged 3.5 per cent for most of election year before winning 6.59 per cent of the vote. In 2015 Peters averaged 5 per cent support and got 8.66 per cent on election night (the final round of polls had him at about 8 per cent).
His rise appears to be starting early this year.
The other figure the Government was watching for is New Zealand posting yet another record immigration high.
The two are undoubtedly linked.
And so the big pre-emptive immigration tweak from National.
On the inside, ministers must have felt like throwing up their hands and telling themselves ‘‘can’t win, don’t try’’. But politics is all about the art of looking like you’re trying.
The Government is selling the tweaks as minor. But from a government that first got elected to power on a promise to reverse New Zealand’s net migration loss, they are significant.
John Key stood in the middle of an empty rugby stadium in 2008 and promised to fill it with returning expats. But even he probably couldn’t foresee his own success – albeit with the benefit of a post-quake construction boom, and a big downturn across the Tasman.
The wave of expats returning home has pumped up the record migration statistics. So too has the corresponding drop in the number of Kiwis heading overseas.
In the year ending June 2016, more than 25,000 people moved from Australia to New Zealand, outnumbering the 23,000 who left New Zealand to settle in Australia. In 2008, when Key did his football stadium thing, Kiwis were escaping across the ditch at a rate of 53,800 that year alone.
But that is not the whole story of course.
The football stadium has filled all over again with a horde of new Kiwis, immigrants attracted to New Zealand by the construction boom, opportunities they don’t get at home, or just because we’re easier to get into than Australia.
This week’s figures showed the net gain from immigration has risen to 71,932. People arriving as permanent and long-term migrants outnumbered those departing by 129,518 to 57,586 in the latest 12 months
For a Government so long focused on selling the good-news aspect of the immigration upturn it has taken some time to catch up with the shifting winds of public opinion.
After all, those two things are linked as well – all the reasons Kiwis are returning or staying home are also the reasons immigration is up.
Which is why the Government has reacted with all the speed of a cruise liner making a turn midocean.
National’s script has always touted immigration as a story of economic success.
Key’s body language was always a big ‘‘whaddya want’’ shrug whenever the subject came up around the traps.
But that economic success story is a hard sell; it’s about intangibles. The take-out of many Kiwis from those headlines of soaring immigration is something that comes much closer to home.
As an excellent article by Stuff’s Andy Fyers shows (How record migration affects traffic, schools, housing and the economy, April 28) the effects are being felt hardest in two key areas, the daily commute and rising house prices.
Since Auckland has seen a net gain of 112,000 migrants in the past five years it’s not hard to see why that city’s housing supply has got so out of whack with demand (though a 2016 study by the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment suggested the impact of immigration on house prices was minimal).
Treasury suggests there is also a chicken and egg effect. While migration, in conjunction with a sluggish supply of new housing land, can have a significant effect on house prices, economic confidence is also to blame.
Because when confidence is high that drives up both house prices and net migration at the same time.
But it’s those downstream effects of rising immigration that have put wings under Peters’ antiimmigration campaign.
Labour leader Andrew Little’s willingness to test the limits of the loyalty of his base, by climbing on to the anti-immigration bus, is an attempt to peel off some of Peters’ support.
But Labour’s problem is that it looks opportunistic, whereas Peters has the anti-immigration cause imprinted on his DNA.
In 2002 Peters picked up an extra eight seats on the back of his three-fingered ‘‘can we fix it’’ campaign – of which immigration was one of the three prongs. The others were law and order and his anti-Treaty of Waitangi bandwagon. In 1996 he shook up the first MMP parliament by sweeping in with the leverage of 17 MPs.
Immigration has always been at the centre of his campaigns, which is why the comparisons with Brexit and Donald Trump – and their strong anti-immigrant overtones – have always been misleading.
As for the suggestion that Trump and Brexit have emboldened Peters to elevate the debate to a new level of ugliness – like his attack on two New Zealand Herald journalists with Asiansounding names? Not so much. It’s just vintage Peters.
Here’s what Peters said in 2002, for instance: ‘‘We are treating thousands of immigrants for all sorts of diseases, who will never work in our economy ever’’, before going on to accuse the government of treason over prioritising immigrants for hospital treatment.
‘‘We can’t help a New Zealander but we can help every Tom, Dick and Harry, Mushtaq and Bin Laden first.’’
But the worldwide sense of turmoil fed by the Trump and Brexit fallout may be giving impetus to Peters’ campaign, just as it may be contributing to New Zealand’s soaring immigration numbers.
And Peters’ message is resonating with a big enough section of Kiwis that he is forcing both major parties to move with him.
National’s Kiwis-first jobs policy is its response. The problem for the Government, of course, is that what goes up usually comes down.
And the downstream effects of even a few minor tweaks could have the effect of creating skills shortages across industries that include hospitality and agriculture.
Any return to the net migration losses of a few years ago will exacerbate those.
But ‘‘can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em’’ seems to be the mantra.