Mike Hosking: Govt's anti-immigration stance will cost us dearly

Part two of Laurel and Hardy of the New Zealand economy. This time it's Grant Robertson and the Government's immigration policy.

The wage numbers were the worst thing that could possibly have happened. They increased at a rate not seen since records began.

It's not the sort of record you want to break. Wages are going up at the rate they are because there are no people left to hire.

As long as this continues, the Reserve Bank will keep putting interest rates up, we will be in a longer and longer stagflation environment, and when it ends, as it always does, it will be more and more ugly.

Everyone is short of labour, everyone. There are, according to our immigration expert who wrote to us yesterday, 150,000 people missing from the economy.

We all agree that there are no locals left, certainly not anyone you would want. The Government seems happy to fund them on a never-ending supply of welfare and apologies.

So the answer is immigration. Trouble is the Government doesn't like that either, and yet can't see the damage it does.

The settings are now patently absurd. The demand to come here, tragically, is obviously diminished as our reputation has been trashed by a government obsessed with lockdowns. Plus, the processing system is a shambles as those who do want to be here are held up by ineptitude.

Whether it's nurses who don’t have a decent path way to residency, the rich folk who have formed a queue of one, the thousands who have chosen Canada and Australia because they get treated better, the answer is fast evaporating in front of our eyes.

You can't have 7 percent plus wage increases in an economy that isn't growing at the same rate, the government can't pretend their polices work, and we can't keep defying gravity and pretending none of this is a crisis.

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It's one thing to have a mess. It's a crime to have a solution, which is immigration, that you refuse to utilise to its fullest extent. Especially given the results if you don’t, and those results
are about to hit us smack between the eyes.

Mike Hosking is a New Zealand television and radio broadcaster. He currently hosts The Mike Hosking Breakfast show on NewstalkZB on weekday mornings.