I wrote yesterday how anti-immigration party, New Zealand First, is likely to win the balance of power in the upcoming 23 September General Election, meaning it will likely decide which major parties form government.
Well, the man that also wants to be ‘kingmaker’ – former economist and philanthropist, Gareth Morgan, from the newly formed The Opportunities Party – is also strongly opposed to New Zealand’s mass immigration program, believing New Zealand’s ‘ideal’ population is just 4 million people. From Interest.co.nz:
Morgan says annual population growth of 2% was “quite a good filler” in the wake of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, but our housing and infrastructure can’t deal with this sort of growth now.
“You’ve got to peel it all back to first principles with immigration; why are you letting anyone in at all? And the answer I would have thought (apart from the compassionate refugee thing) should be because by them coming here, they’re going to lift the living standard… of you and I. And if they’re not, why would we have them here?”
Ultimately, Morgan believes four million is New Zealand’s population sweet spot.
“New Zealand is unbelievably attractive. The demand is infinite. So we should be screwing the highest price out of it… that’s how you make your money. You don’t need more people to do it.”
It is worth pointing out that New Zealand’s population is already around 4.7 million and is projected by Statistics New Zealand to rise to around 6.5 million by 2068 (50th percentile), and would hit roughly 5.25 million even under zero net overseas migration:
Thus, Morgan presumably believes that New Zealand’s population is already too big.
We also know that Morgan is highly critical of the National Government’s mass immigration program, last week penning the following:
As a strategy, sacrificing quality for quantity of migrants is a recipe for disaster…
It is highly skilled workers that create wealth and the sooner the immigration policy rediscovers this truth the better. The quantity mantra is not only putting strain on infrastructure, it is accompanied by wall-to-wall corruption in immigration practices. The troubles for the foreign education sector have already been well documented but there’s frequent anecdotal evidence around general immigration practices also being corrupt as desperate low skilled foreign workers pay off employers to falsify their reported salaries in order to meet residency requirements. There is no reason to believe the corruption is restricted only to the foreign student education sector.
Expanding the size of the economy through stoking the numbers of foreign migrants while the inequality gap is widened even further, and the modestly paid are trapped on wages below that require to live on, is a curious way to improve New Zealanders’ lives. It is of course a strategy to improve the incomes of some at the expense of others and so I would say it has to stop.
At the rate we’re going New Zealand will be changed forever, the things we value such as being a small but well-off society living in a land where our most precious commodity is personal space and environmental health, are being sacrificed at the altar of economic prosperity for some.
The Opportunities Party’s official immigration party has also called for a smaller, smarter immigration intake:
Immigration should not be driven by student visas, nor reciprocal visitor working visas it should only be about whether the immigrant benefits us. Of course migrants accepted for humanitarian reasons are a separate issue…
TOP will make it quicker and simpler for truly skilled people to live and work here. This will require changes to our visa regime…
There’s a big downside from too many migrants, particularly if they are working in low-skilled jobs. Establishment parties have wrecked New Zealand’s immigration policy by making it a tool of what they believed was a lucrative foreign education industry. But we’ve ended up selling low quality education packages to desperate economic refugees from India and China. Foreign students have been granted the right to work here while studying and they then stay on in jobs (any jobs that is – glorified dishwashers is a favourite) to get more points to qualify for residency. Government has lifted points for work experience to 60 of the 160 required! It’s a policy rife with rorts, there’s a steady stream of them being reported or investigated.
Whichever way you cut it, New Zealand’s mass immigration program is in deep trouble. The parties that are likely to hold the balance of power – New Zealand First and The Opportunities Party – simply won’t stand for it.
Australia is next.
