Hooton’s numbers on the reliance of mass immigration to NZ are difficult to digest because of the ramifications of it all economically, culturally and politically…
New Zealand’s fiscal future may hinge on getting one million new immigrants by 2050 – Matthew Hooton
The good news about Treasury’s long-term projections – at least from a narrow fiscal perspective – is that they could have been much worse.
Treasury’s Long-Term Fiscal Statement (LTFS) again confirmed net core Crown debt will pass 100% of GDP by 2050, and then – assuming the bond markets allow it – 200% just 15 years later.
Yet those calamitous projections would have been worse had Treasury not massively increased its assumptions about immigration from 2030 and beyond.
When it prepared the first LTFS in 2006, Treasury assumed net immigration of only around 10,000 a year. It’s averaged more than three times that.
A net 250,000 new immigrants arrived in the nine years of the Key-English Government, the majority in its last term, according to the LTFS.
Despite Covid, net immigration rose even higher under the Ardern-Hipkins Government to 270,000 in six years, including a net 108,000 in 2023.
The Luxon Government has already attracted an estimated net 84,000 new immigrants.
Treasury’s projections rely on another million new immigrants arriving over the next 25 years to push the population up to 6.7 million by 2050. Immigration must then stay high to get the population to 7.4 million by 2065, to keep debt down to “only” 200% of GDP.
…Both Labour and National over the last 3 decades have used mass immigration as a lazy GDP bump rather than invest in us as a people to expand our own population base.
Like everything, all Parties have allowed the free market to work it out rather than protect our own people AND migrant workers from being exploited!
Auckland has ground to a fucking gridlocked stand still because it’s size has grown by 17% without any of the extra revenue to pay for that growth!
At some point we are going to have to have a serious conversation about mass immigration and how it is killing this country!
You can’t bring that huge number of people into NZ each and every single year without there being intense cultural, political and social friction.
Here are 5 ideas.
1 – Halt all immigration coming in for 3 years so the infrastructure can catch up while offering amnesty for all current overstayers.
2 – We have to incentivise Kiwis into lifting their fertility rates and heavily subsidise childcare and maternity leave – we need us having more kids to keep up with the population requirements so we don’t need to keep importing so many people.
3 – Lift our refugee numbers with wrap around services – we have an obligation as a Liberal Progressive Democracy to provide haven for those being damaged on a warring planet.
4 – Ensure every single migrant worker coming into NZ are automatically enrolled in a migrant Union to ensure they are being paid the same as domestic workers so bosses can’t exploit them.
5 – Bonded education – pay the fees and provide a living allowance plus cheap accomodation to all domestic Kiwis training to be teachers, drs, nurses, and all other public service roles and jobs – they get the education for free in return for 5 years bonded service in NZ.
These 5 ideas allow us to show kindness, prudence and build our own population up while standing by our democratic values.
Allowing the free market to simply push out anyone with skills to bring in cheaper work forces for exploitation IS NOT AN IMMIGRATION POLICY and it allows for hate grifters like Tommy Robinson take over the debate using malice, ignorance and fear.
It’s only a matter of time that those hates wash up in NZ thanks to social media hate algorithms.
As the planet burns, these trends are are only going to become more extreme, we will start seeing vast numbers of climate refugees fleeing parts of the planet that become increasingly inhospitable, so we need a plan to cope with that while holding onto the Anglo-Saxon values that make our Democracy so attractive in the first place.
Those Anglo-Saxon values don’t have a skin colour, (Free Speech, free contract, free assembly, parliamentary control of the executive, an independent Judiciary, no taxation without representation and the liberty of the individual), are universal!
We welcome our migrant brothers and sisters because the values we stand for recognise the importance of the individual, but we also need to recognise the pressures generated by mass immigration when we are economically played off against each other.
Protecting our migrant communities from exploitation strengthens us all and a multi-cultural society is a strength, not a weakness.
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The leader of the English Greens, in a recent podcast, said that while resistance to migration is not, as Starmer likes to claim, driven by racism, the burgeoning inequality created by the failure of current market driven economic decisions is likely to create embedded real racism as desperation grows.
And, under the Dunning – Kruger driven Coalition policies, sustained failure and burgeoning inequality is on the horizon sooner rather than later.
There’d be a lot to be said for restricting migration from countries with extremely low trade union membership- less than 30% or so- to only members of trade unions in the source countries.
Professions in short supply in New Zealand include engineers (civil, structural, electrical, mechanical), skilled trades (plumbers, carpenters, welders, mechanics), construction roles (managers, surveyors), IT and telecommunications specialists, and some health and community roles.
Lets stick to the labour shortages – eh!
One ad-hoc area is with Qualified Electricians leaving the industry in droves. Retiring or heading to Oz for a better life. No qualified electricians = no apprentices.
Over the last three neoliberal decades has importing 2 million extra people increased NZs GDP per capita?
We still have the same capacity of hydro lakes, less gas reserves, the same capacity to produce milk powder and carbon credits but that primary wealth now has to support 60 percent more people.
Would the people and the environment have been better off if the population was still 3 million?
3 million? That was a while back now. 1973 to be precise, the year of the Great Ngaruawahia Music Festival on the banks of the Waikato River where Black Sabbath headlined and Split Endz went unnoticed. The same year oil prices shot up and the UK joined the EEC and threw a spanner in the works. The dye was cast. A decade later the Fourth Labour Govt adopted a global economic ideology that reached fever pitch a decade later under the Nats. Around this time immigration policy was changed with the removal of white preference and East Asians arrived en masse, followed the middle classes from the Indian sub-continent because they had some English, a legacy of British imperialism. Come the new millennium targeted skills categories were largely surpassed by an assortment of work to resident schemes. The good ol’ days were gone and things have never been the same. In quiet moments though ya wonder what it might have been like.
We need to get off the endless pursuit of growth band wagon .The economy is said to grow each year but the standard of living does not .Im not sure what the GDP per person is at the moment but am willing to bet it has not gone up much in the last 40 years .One only has to look at the massive increase in poverty in the country to see that it has not improved the well being of NZ as a whole .
Just yesterday people in business in central Auckland were bleating about all the poverty stricken people living on the streets there but not actually wanting to do anything to fix the cause of that situation .Their solution was bring in more police and move them out to another place in the city so they did not have to see how their self greed actions were affecting NZ .wE PUT 30 EXTRA POLICE INTO DOWN TOWN LAST YEAR AND THE PM AND MINISTER WERE CROWING ABOUT THE SUCCESS THEY HAD AT REDUCING CRIME IN THE AREA .Well yesterdays bleat shows that to be another blatant lie from the PM and his bull shit mate .
And we continue to bash our own for not having a full time job while we import unemployment by the plane load .Untill all our under 25s have a full time well paying job we should not issue a work permit to any one from outside of NZ .
Well said both comments Gordon.