That’s a provisional figure, but if it’s revised by Stats NZ (and it will be), recent trends suggest it will be revised upward.
On an annual basis, it is the largest nominal increase we’ve seen in our history. It represents a growth rate of 2.8 per cent.
There may have been more rapid percentage increases through the colonial era, but in the modern era, this is unprecedented. We managed 2.5 per cent population growth at the peak of the post-war baby boom in 1962. We hit 2.2 per cent at the peak of the John Key Government immigration boom in 2016.
That growth rate puts New Zealand in the same ballpark as some of the fastest-growing countries in the world, which are mostly found in sub-Saharan Africa.
At 2.8 per cent, we’re sitting above Tanzania and Mozambique but just below Zambia. Apart from all having the coolest consonant in our names, we don’t have much else that bears comparison with these nations.
They are, to put it bluntly, very poor.
People get quite animated when they see New Zealand sitting beside sub-Saharan African nations on economic league tables.
Last year there was a fuss when the IMF projected New Zealand’s 2024 GDP growth rate would be the second-worst in the world after Equatorial Guinea.
Of course, there is some context that makes comparisons like that a bit silly.
In the above case, it was that New Zealand’s projected growth (at 0.8 per cent) was statistically far further from Equatorial Guinea’s (minus 8.2 per cent) than it was from other developed nations (all facing low growth this year).
We were also the first developed nation to slam on the interest rate brakes to cool our economy and bring down inflation.
Equatorial Guinea - as you can imagine - has more serious issues to deal with (google them yourself, if for any reason you are feeling excessively cheery about the state of the world).
The same is true with population growth. The comparison with the African nations is accurate and illustrative, but also limited once you add a bit of context.
The sub-Saharan nations all have extremely high birth rates and that has a lot to do with poverty and education rates of women.
Meanwhile, our birth rate is, like much of the developed world, very low and falling towards negative territory.
Based on births minus deaths, we added just 19,100 new Kiwi kids last year. The rest of our population growth was down to an unprecedented immigration boom.
As ever, our nearest neighbour and cultural buddy Australia offers a more relevant comparison. Australia also threw open its borders after the pandemic to address a labour shortage that was driving up domestic inflation.
Australia saw a net gain of about 625,000 people in the year to November. That’s a growth rate of 2.4 per cent.
So we win! But do we want to? Is the current growth rate too high? Has it now started to fuel inflation too? Or is it the only thing keeping our economy afloat?
How bad would already lacklustre GDP growth be if we hadn’t poured record numbers of new consumers into our economy?
In Japan (another comparison) they have never much liked immigration. But they also have one of the lowest birth rates and older populations in the world.
The Japanese population shrank by almost half a million people last year. It also officially entered recession last week.
Its two successive negative quarters give it an annualised growth rate of minus 0.4 per cent. That’s worse than us (although still a long way shy of Equatorial Guinea).
On balance, I think we should be grateful we are a nation that can use immigration as a lever to address labour shortages and prop up growth.
That doesn’t mean we should rely on it. Net migration gains in the past 18 months have solved the labour shortage.
Unless the extra economic activity migrants deliver is productive, it will also be inflationary. All of a sudden we’re worrying about what all that population growth is going to mean for mortgage rates.
Ultimately, we need to be sure the skills migrants bring are boosting the productive end of the economy and that we’re investing the extra revenue they bring into infrastructure.
That is easier said than done. Immigration policy is an easy thing to tweak but the results of those tweaks aren’t always easy to predict.
Every number in the migration statistics is a human who made a huge and brave choice to pack up their life and take a risk on the New Zealand economy.
Meanwhile, our economic conditions can change fast. We may suddenly find ourselves with too many construction workers as that sector slows, but we still need workers in many other specialist fields.
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon has astutely observed that what we need is more migrants with capital and plans to invest it in business and housing.
He may have a hard time getting that sort of policy tweak past New Zealand First, of course.
But regardless, the issue is going to need urgent attention. The post-pandemic wave may fade but the importance of immigration policy to New Zealand’s future will not.
