Immigration: Is New Zealand growing too fast to keep up? - The Front Page

New Zealand is getting more crowded with the highest annual migration ever. Photo / NZ Herald

New Zealand is currently experiencing the fastest immigration net gain in its history - and the country is likely not prepared.

Data released by Stats NZ last week reveal New Zealand had an annual net migration of 126,000 people in the year to December 2023 - the highest-ever figure for a calendar year. That’s despite a record 47,000 Kiwis leaving the country in the same period.

NZ Herald business editor at large Liam Dann told The Front Page, the Herald’s daily news podcast, that on top of the migration gain, we added about 19,000 births - seeing a record population growth of 145,000.

He said a lot of this was due to pent-up demand for people to move here who couldn’t due to Covid, and the previous government making it easier to come here.

“In late 2022, the Labour Government also tweaked or really opened up their immigration policy settings in order to help get more workers in. At the time, the message coming from a lot of the business community and political and business commentators was that this was going to be a real race between other nations like Canada and Australia and the UK to attract the best immigrants and that New Zealand was being left behind.”

Dann said that actually hasn’t been the case, with New Zealand seeing 2.8 per cent growth to Australia’s 2.4 per cent.

In the wake of these record figures, Immigration Minister Erica Stanford told TVNZ’s Q+A that officials were looking at potentially tweaking the settings now to deal with the growth.

Dann said that was “pretty ironic” that National was now considering restricting immigration, when they heavily criticised the Labour Government for being too restrictive in the aftermath of Covid-19 border closures.

However, this does show the difficulty for any government when it comes to setting immigration policy.

“It’s very difficult when you actually tweak a policy to know what the impact will be once it actually flows all the way through to people packing up their lives and moving.”

He said that it’s difficult for governments to be reactive in situations like this, but it is also impossible for the country to keep up this rate of growth, as all signs suggest we are already behind.

“If you’re, taking the economic gains from migration, in terms of extra people in the economy, driving growth and doing the jobs that we need done. But you have to look at any gain to the economy has to be a net gain. You have to look at the cost of the extra infrastructure needed and housing - and New Zealand’s way behind.”

Listen to the full episode to hear more from Liam Dann on why we can’t maintain more record migration.

The Front Page is a daily news podcast from the New Zealand Herald, available to listen to every weekday from 5am. This episode was presented by Chelsea Daniels, an Auckland-based journalist with a background in world news and crime/justice reporting who joined Newstalk ZB in 2016.

You can follow the podcast at iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.