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The Detail is a daily news podcast produced for RNZ by Press room and is posted on Stuff with permission. Click on this link to subscribe to the podcast.
They are midwives, nurses, teachers, CEOs, engineering professionals, people who work in the service industries … all the industries where the country is in short supply.
They are shortening their adventures abroad, packing up their lives in more exciting places, fleeing the lockdown and returning home. They bring connections and skills. The kiwi diaspora is reversing.
Ricky Wilson / Stuff
We have gone from losing almost 20,000 New Zealanders a year to foreign countries, to gaining 7,200 for the year, in March.
Today in The detail Sharon Brettkelly speaks with economist July Fry, who lives between New York and New Zealand. She discusses immigration policy issues.
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“New Zealand looks very attractive right now,” he says.
At the moment the numbers are crazy. We have gone from losing nearly 20,000 New Zealanders a year to foreign countries, to gaining 7,200 for the year in March. As the borders were closed, they continued to arrive, choosing to spend two weeks in a hotel room in isolation to be here.
Being able to predict how many of those people will stay is looking at a very cloudy crystal ball. “This is decision-making under extreme uncertainty,” says Fry. “Who knows when there will be a vaccine, who knows if people will be able to return to their place of origin, everyone faces difficult decisions.”
Julie Fry also dismisses ideas that returning kiwis are buying houses and driving prices up, saying the numbers aren’t there for that. “If you think we have a net gain of 7,200 kiwis relative to an average year where we could have a net migration of 56,000 people … numerically, you would expect the impact to be less. If you look at demographic pressures derived from inflows in previous years, it doesn’t come close to that kind of scale.
“The real problem is the lack of housing supply. You can’t blame them for something that has been going on for years. “
Stats NZ has improved its game during Covid and is collecting more data, faster than it used to. Demographer Kim Dunstan says migration both inward and outward is important in many ways. It is fed by official population estimates and is widely used as an indicator such as housing demand.
Right now, daily updates are coming in from Customs and being posted on the Stats NZ website, on the Covid-19 data portal.
Several citizens may have returned with the intention of staying for a few weeks or months, but with the developments of the pandemic they stay long enough to be described as migrants.
Brettkelly also talks to newcomer Jonathan Milne, NewsroomPro’s new editor, who brought his family back from a stint in the Cook Islands. He tells her what was behind his decision to uproot earlier than planned and return home in these uncertain times.
“I think it could be an inspiring and innovative moment for New Zealand,” he says.
