According to Bernard Hickey, writing in today's HOS:
New Zealand created 120,000 new jobs in the past two years, but the number of unemployed and underemployed rose.Really?
How did that happen?
Essentially New Zealand imported a net 123,900 people to do those jobs.
Hickey has added together the net migration gain for the two years to March 2016. From Stats NZ:
Unadjusted figures showed a record net gain of 67,600 migrants in the March 2016 year.The balance, 56,300 was the net figure for the previous year
What he omits to add is that in the March 2016 year:
1/ New Zealand citizens returning to live in New Zealand accounted for one-quarter of all migrant arrivals
2/ 27,700 arrivals were on student visas
3/ 36,000 arrivals had New Zealand or Australian visas
This idea of foreigners taking Kiwi jobs is another gaining currency (with a good flogging from the they're-taking-our-houses NZ Herald.) There are certainly more immigrants coming to NZ to work and settle. But to talk about "importing" 123,900 workers when many of them are New Zealanders is misleading.
Hickey says that social, justice and educational policy settings are failing to turn out employable Kiwis, or that employers won't pay them enough to make it worth their while.
We all know that welfare is to blame for the situation whereby some New Zealanders have gotten "lazy" (the word a refugee recently used to me to describe people who sit on benefits when he had managed to get himself work with virtually no English and no help from WINZ).
Hickey concludes,
"Simply opening up the doors for more migrants is not the answer in the long run."
Actually it just might be. The kind of people who will make up NZ's population in the future will not tolerate the sort of welfarism which was never a feature of their birth countries. They know how damaging it can be.
3 comments:
That's a good point Lindsay. Just imagine, refugees and immigrants refute the welfare state!
It doesn't appear to have happened in the UK and Europe, but it may happen here. I hope it does. Perhaps it depends a good deal on what migrants we let in.
Foreigners who are willing to travel to where the work is and accept low wages because their alternative is having nothing are getting jobs in preference to young kiwis who need higher wages to make it worth getting out of bed and off the benefit. Surprise.
It doesn't appear to have happened in the UK and Europe, but it may happen here.
Immigrants to the UK and Europe are mostly from the subcontinent.
Immigrants to NZ are mostly from China - currently the most capitalist country in the world.
The problem is very very clear: benefits (which, just to be clear, includes welfare for families tax breaks, "progressive" taxes, state health and state education and above all National (Party) super). NZ is essentially a communist country. The solution is equally as clear - just as in Russia in the 1980s, we need quite reforms: stop all the welfare, the benefits, the tax breaks, sell the schools and hospitals, flatten out the tax rate, business taxes to zero, and terminate all super.
Anyone who is in the least economically competent knows this. John Key most certainly does. Which is why we need to get rid of MPP and return to FPP - a reasonable "country quota" if we can't get a taxpayer franchise.
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