Can anyone take the Productivity Commission’s recommendations on migration seriously after today?
They’ve just put out their draft report into the impact of migration on New Zealand productivity and one of their recommendations is to favour residency for migrants who learn Te Reo Māori.
Do any of us actually believe that being able to speak Te Reo Māori is going to make any of these migrants any more productive?
I'm not knocking the Māori language. You know I've spent years learning it. But it’s not even in my top 20 most necessary skills for a migrant.
We don’t have the luxury to be pontificating on nonsense like this at the moment.
We are going to need migration quick smart once we open the borders.
Our unemployment rate at 3.4 per cent points to a massive problem with skills shortages which is probably now at crisis point.
We’ve heard this from employers across all kinds of sectors: tech, dairy, construction, health, horticulture.
It’s going to get miles worse once we open our borders because a whole bunch of young Kiwis will head off overseas immediately.
At that point, when our employers are even more desperate than they are now, hands up who’s going to say we better not let builders or doctors become residents because they aren’t learning Te Reo Māori.
Suggesting this kind of thing just opens the Productivity Commission up to ridicule.
That's a pity because there’s actually some genuinely good stuff in the draft report.
For example, the Commission knocks on the head the argument that migrants drop Kiwis’ wages. That is such an important point because that has been Labour Government’s argument for cutting off migration.
The Productivity Commission says no, on average, that doesn’t happen.
Also, the Commission recommends that we need to build enough infrastructure to be able to handle the numbers of migrants we expect.
Few of us would argue with this given that we’ve all seen the stress our schools and roads are under and we’re all acutely aware of the fact that we don’t have enough houses for ourselves, let alone new arrivals.
But we’re not talking about that, are we? We’re talking about migrants needing to learn Te Reo because the Productivity Commission got itself weirdly distracted. How disappointing.
Heather du Plessis-Allan is a journalist and commentator who hosts Newstalk ZB's Drive show.
3 comments:
With the woeful state NZs education system finds itself in, dropping well below average in maths, English and science achievement, compared to our competitors, migration will become even more important. Because that's the only place we'll find competent people to run our businesses and create our wealth.
Like all public bodies, the Productivity Commission has been hijacked by pro-Maori woke activists and makes brainless race-driven recommendations as a matter of course. I suspect that the last thing the Productivity Commission knows much about is productivity. Yet another pointless organisation. Get a bunch of successful business people together and you'd certainly get a lot more sense out of them. For starters they know what productivity means!
You seem to assume that all these migrants are highly skilled, highly intelligent and bring missing skills.
The reality, as the rest of the report mentions, is our governments for decades have run a ponzi scheme on immigration. Spend nothing on the extra infrastructure required, dump most of the problems on local councils, then claim to have a rockstar economy.
But that is okay when all you need is a cheap cup of coffee, a cheap uber and the shelves in your supermarket stocked.
The Productivity Commission is now the honorary Monty Python Commission.
This latest ludicrous requirement that they have wokely added to the required skill set illustrates just how many light years out of touch with the real world they are.
This is just yet another example of a bunch of Wellington desk bound office "experts" living in their p.c., latte drinking, isolated existence.
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