The Labour Government has loosened migration settings for the third time in five months in an attempt to juice population and economic growth at the same time as taking wage pressure off employers, inflation and interest rates more generally.
The changes include expanding the 'Green List' for work-to-residency visas to include nurses, construction workers, gasfitters, drainlayers, crane operators, halal slaughterers, mechanics, telecommunications technicians and teachers, while the juicier straight-to-residency visa Green List was expanded to include midwives, a wider variety of doctors and auditors.
Facing a potentially election-losing deficit in opinion polls, the Government has also moved to cauterise complaints from business, health and education employers that a migration 'reset' or 'rebalance' announced just seven months ago to improve local skill levels and wages was instead knee-capping economic growth and causing inflation.
PM Jacinda Ardern used her last post-cabinet news conference of the year to announce the changes alongside Immigration Minister Michael Wood and faced repeated questioning about why the Government had delayed the inclusion of nurses on the Green lLst after almost a year of calls for a relaxation.
"We need to attract skilled workers to our shores without pay, without conditions and with certainty," Ardern told the news conference.
"So in discussions with business in sector groups, we're expanding on our plan to make New Zealand the most attractive place in the world to live," she said.
"That's why today we're announcing the expansion of the Green List, which provides two fast tracks to residency to help attract people to New Zealand and fill labor shortages."
Elsewhere, the Government would also:
- offer bus and truck drivers a "time-limited residence pathway" through a sector agreement;
- automatically extend employer accreditation by 12 months if their first accreditation is applied for by 4 July 202;
- introduce a streamlined Specific Purpose work visa to help keep the approximate 2,500 long-term critical workers already in the country to continue to work in their current role for up to three years; and,
- providing a 12-month Open Work Visa for approximately 1,800 previous holders of Post Study Work Visas who missed out because of the border closure in 2020-21 during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Ardern and Wood said they did not have advice on the potential number of new migrants the changes would create, or the likely economic impacts on inflation, unemployment, rents or house prices.
They pointed to recently low-to-negative net migration to justify the loosening of the settings, although overall inward net migration has picked up in recent months, particularly of non-New Zealand citizens offsetting the number of New Zealanders leaving to live permanently in Australia because of wages 30% to 40% higher there. The gap is even larger after housing costs, where rents and housing costs are a lower share of disposable income in Australia than New Zealand.
The latest changes are the third set of loosenings in five months, including a reopening of the skilled migrant category for residency visas in October (see story here) and a loosening in August (see story here) to cut the wage rules for years for the aged care, construction, meat processing, seafood and adventure tourism sectors, and to double the cap for working holidaymakers, who can work for anything above the minimum wage.
Wood said the whole world was experiencing labour shortages right now and the Government had listened to business requests for more opportunities to recruit internationally.
“We have approved over 94,000 job positions for international recruitment, granted over 40,000 working holiday visas, reopened the Pacific Access Category and Samoa Quota, delivered the largest increase in a decade to the RSE scheme, and resumed the Skilled Migrant Category and Parent Category so as to strengthen our international offering – but there is more we can do to support businesses to attract the workers they need," Wood said.
“New Zealand’s strong economic position during a time of global downturn presents a unique opportunity to attract more high skilled migrant workers to our shores, as we prepare for a challenging year ahead. We understand that labour shortages are the biggest issue facing New Zealand businesses, and are contributing to cost of living pressures too," he said.
"These measures are about addressing those shortages and providing greater certainty to businesses as they recover from the pandemic."
Wood said the Green List would be reviewed again in mid-2023.
The 134,000 migrants approved to come in over the next year adds to the 200,000 migrant workers granted residency because they stayed here during Covid 19. In September, Wood also increased the annual quota for temporary Registered Seasonal Employee scheme workers from Vanuatu, Fiji, Samoa, Tonga, the Solomon Islands and Tuvalu by 3,000 to 19,000, which was the largest increase in over a decade.
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And suddenly all policies are on the table for debate: https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/130741202/ardern-asks-cabinet…
Of course you'd have to be a few sandwiches short not to figure out that they'll pull some of the contentious policies (and dishonestly claim they won't be coming back, knowing full well they will be) with a view to pull a switcheroo if a victory can be secured in 2023.
Yes, this is correct. I have a family member who has worked in various management roles in the meat industry and all the major players are Halal (presumably because the average punter doesn't care, and so you can have one process that allows sales to the export Halal markets and domestic market).
The animal must bleed to death to qualify as halal and therefore muslim markets. There are other requisites such as a prayer and the positioning of the slaughter itself with concern to the location of Mecca. zTo satisify our own “humane” slaughter protocols the animal must be senseless, painless, stunned (take your pick) before meeting said fate. That’s all well and good but in the confines, speed and monotony of a chain it is an extreme license to claim that every carcass is processed exactly to that procedure.
As an engineering grad I had to do a number of hours of accredited work before graduation (not sure they still do this). I worked a summer holiday at the Takapau freezing works. It was then a three chain sheep plant, all chains where halal killed. (it was about 1986/87). Every animal was stunned as it came into plant and rolled down onto the slaughter table. there a Halal slaughter person (though back then they where all men) would slit its throat and it would bleed out. It would be hung on the chain as this occured.
There was a rare time a sheep would escape before they could be cut, it was temporary as the chain members liked a bit of sport.
It was an interesting job, fitters mate. I was the lowest paid person on the plant by hour, but due to the number of hours we had to work I still took home around $1,000 a week after tax, in 1986. An average NZ house was $71,222
Well, in search of better prospects, you could have wandered across to Tomoana, the beef house, and taken up being the bucket boy, collecting the blood gush post sticking. An old acquaintance started his career in that role at Hellaby Westfield and ended up in head office marketing, and was about the best of that lot too.
Surely by now it is starkly obvious that this government is incapable of reacting to any one situation until after it has happened. The stable doors are swinging and suddenly someone wakes up and shouts, anybody seen the horse. This, proven by record, poor response mechanism confirms that this government’s crowning achievement, a pandemic response of closing the border and enforcing a lockdown was not their decision but instead at the behest of intense intervention by medical professionals and relative government officials. In fact it took the same level of intervention by legal experts to prevent this government subverting recognised and accepted democratic protocols in order to legislate three waters entrenchment. A government that doesn’t know what to do, anymore than know what it does do, will do.
Surely by now it is starkly obvious that this government is incapable of reacting to any one situation until after it has happened.
Some parts of this are decades in the making, from a lack of a decent apprenticeship system, to tertiary education that doesn't align with our actual labour requirements.
Education for sectors like nursing and teaching should be free with additional perks for sticking around.
It is generally accepted though that this government inherited public health services that had been neglected by preceding governments. The arrival of covid thrust this into stark relief. Surely the priority of streamlining recruiting of clinically qualified returnees and immigrants should have been enacted, in a meaningful and effective manner, right then, rather than waiting until now?
the world is short of certain job skills, but out of that technology is being made to replace those workers, we have seen it already from ATM's replacing bank tellers to self checkouts and self order machines replacing counter staff,
a lot of NZ business have been very slow to embrace tech to replace some low paid jobs
Are Driverless Trucks The Future Of Shipping? Inside Waymo’s New Test Program - YouTube
Perhaps Immigration NZ didn't get the memo..
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jul/14/100-pure-rip-off-new-zeal…
Its logical as higher demand creates the setting. Rents have not been going up in Auckland the last 12 moths so I think there is a lot of scope. That comes across as insensitive however it is what it is
Some.of the usual affiliates here have disappeared. Probably hunting for cheap homes to buy. First they say dont buy a falling knife, then announce they bought a home. Happens often
It's a true story, you're looking at what, 18-24 months from commission to move in?
Unless Australia is emptying out also, they've got similar housing supply and rental market issues, so I'm not sure where this tsunami of escaping kiwis are going to be living, and living cheaply.
Well obviously it would resume.
But what is the end game in building a society where we pay to educate Kiwis only to send them off overseas to chase a better life, and instead import people willing to work for less just to keep wages down? Is that sustainable forever?
Do we need to be importing construction workers as the building sector seems to be facing headwinds?
Maybe a protracted period of a tight labour market might encourage better investment in automation technologies, upskilling staff, and other methods of improving productivity?
And the elephant in the room - if this is so necessary, why is it only just being done in response to poor polling?
We aren't even educating and training enough people in various sectors despite people's ability to move overseas as they are free to do so.
We are also a decade or two at least from a humanoid construction robot. There are few technologies we can slot in the short term to make up for the shortfalls.
And finally, we have a lack of working age people in our population.
It's either migration or a very constrained economy.
It is disappointing, I feel like there was this opportunity to do something different post the covid debacle. There's a startling lack of any ideas or will to change anything. Bottom of the cliff thinking is where its at.
Luxon seems equally as beige and uninspiring.
I'm not sure what you think the alternative is.
Globally, there are labour shortages due a couple of years of frozen migration. Exacerbated by aging demographics and a lack of indigenous workers in key fields (usually yuck ones no one wants to do anymore).
This all seems fairly logical.
You have a very high expectation regarding the speed at which governments make and enact decisions.
And again even in a slump, the construction sector lacks labour in many key areas. Even when people aren't building new houses we still need a lot of other functions performed that aren't 100% transferable from chucking up cheap 3 beddies in Greenfield subdivisons. Steel fabricators and fixers, tiltslab pourers and installers, industrial electricians, fire protection services, data installers, etc etc etc.
But yes government bad do boo-boo.
Migration rules aren't usually an emergency situation.
These changes will be years in bearing fruit, because people usually don't just up and move country at a moment's notice.
You don't have to buy what I'm saying, but if you want to avoid being a generic crank like Rex Pat it'd pay to jerk the knee a bit less.
Great, so we get more cheap labour for the ultra wealthy? More competition for the shortage of rentals? More pressure in favour housing unaffordability? More infrastructure deficit? More ethnic division as our country becomes an ungovernable mess of ethnic conflict?
The original labour movement attempted to control the supply of labour to improve the conditions of workers, by forcing employers to compete for the price of Labour. It rose the living standard immensely and ultimately led to vastly improving productivity investment.
Close the damn door. Fuck off, we're full.
The original labour movement attempted to control the supply of labour to improve the conditions of workers, by forcing employers to compete for the price of Labour.
That's not what or how the original labour movement conducted itself. It set about forcing employment standards through unions.
Sounds like we definitely need more history teachers.
More ethnic division as our country becomes an ungovernable mess of ethnic conflict?
National Front alert.
They most definitely did attempt to control the labour supply. It is why they used unions as organising bodies to control the available supply of labour. Literally read any of the histories of the labour movement circa 1880 to 1925.
As for the National Front, it is pretty obvious the ethnic diversity == ungovernable mess. Wholefoods explicitly uses diversity metrics for employment quotas explicitly to limit worker union formation. Amazon Warehouses use the same practice. Also historically unions tended to form along ethnic + religious lines. It benefits the capitalists as the cost of everyone. Any study of the AustroHungarian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the Islamic gunpowder empires in India or the British governance of Singapore teaches you that.
by forcing employers to compete for the price of Labour.
No, through collective bargaining. It was about overall conditions, not purely wages.
As for the National Front, it is pretty obvious the ethnic diversity == ungovernable mess.
Only if you're tunnel visioned. While it's easier to control and manage a homogenous culture, the planet is also full of highly functional multicultural societies. You even mentioned Singapore in your comment.
Enjoying inflation are you.
Labour was enjoying the wage rises very much, until they connect the dots that meant they were going to lose the election.
Failed experiment, due to zero economics understanding, that their polices would lead to:
1. Rent rises
2. Interest rate rises
3. Massive Cost of Living Rises
4. No bus drives
5. Not enough nurses
6. Crops being left to rot on the ground.
7. Lost election
A labour shortage is good because it encourages increases in productivity through a labour to capital switch.
We should be moving away from those industries that require lots of cheap labour as they are sucking up labour that could be used in more productive areas of the economy.
Economic strategy - nah its tactics time it’s about what we have to do not what we should do. Having a strategy with clear objectives and a plan to achieve them - nah. No plan, no buy in from the team of 5m! Planning horizon for this regime is 2023. Then goodbye leaving a mess to sort out.
What did you expect?
Our election cycles are shorter than the time it takes to complete a degree and get a year of work experience. So the pain felt from the policy changes was always going to be felt through an election cycle. Of course it was going to be wound back.
No mention of the real cause of climate change - too many people!
Even very few of the commenters make any comment that could be interpreted towards this. Thought i might see a comment from PDK, but just silence.
How about building a resilient economy needing less people?
When a govt micro manages things it knows nothing about, this is what happens.
Its only the fact they realise they are going to lose next years election that they start to connect the dots.
Letting in people that NZ is short of, should be handled by market forces, not micro cheery picked by baffoons who have no idea what they are doing.
Its too late for the election as they havent thought through the lag time for these things to come into affect.
But what they are wanting to do, is proivide firms with the staff they need to produce goods and services to meet demand, so prices stop rising.
Then inflation comes under control and interest rates go back to a more normal setting.
Its basic Economics 101 that many people were telling them about 12 to 24 months ago.
All the unpicked crops and limited hours firms worked due to not having the right staffing mix, being a perfect example.
I am inagreement with a 73 year old talk back caller the other day who said he and his freinds are "bewildered" about everything this govt does.
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