New Zealand is in danger of losing the global talent war
Wednesday, 7 September 2022
Iain MacLeod is a director of immigration consultancy IMMagine Australia and New Zealand. He is a former vice-chairman of the New Zealand Association for Migration and Investment, and the NZ Immigration Institute.
OPINION: There are those in political circles who appear to want to ignore it and pretend it isn't happening, but it is.
New Zealand competes primarily with Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia for the highly skilled migrants that we so desperately need to fill some of the 97,000 job vacancies that we have at the current time.
The Canadians upped their numbers around a year ago.
The Australians have just turbocharged their skilled migrant programme.
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In New Zealand, we're still waiting for the Government to tell us what the skilled migrant future looks like.
While the New Zealand Government fiddles, Rome burns. Or rather the Romans are heading to Australia because it offers them residence certainty.
In his government’s May 2022 budget, then Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison reversed the relative weightings of skilled versus family permanent resident visas on offer.
Whereas in recent years, around two-thirds of all permanent resident visas went to family/partners and one-third to skilled and business applicants, that has now been flipped.
This has created a residence pathway for tens of thousands more people – the very talent employers in New Zealand are screaming out for.
Last week, following the jobs and skills summit in Australia, as widely predicted, the government also confirmed an increase in the number of permanent resident visas available to the highly skilled, from 160,000 to 195,000 a year.
That’s two significant changes that risk leaving us in their Australian dust.
During the pandemic, when it closed its borders to immigration, Australia saw around 100,000 skilled people leave the country. Unemployment in Australia is now at record lows and at, around 3.2% – the same as New Zealand.
At the time of writing it is estimated there are 500,000 unfilled job vacancies in Australia. For the first time in history there is now one job vacancy for every unemployed person.
In New Zealand it is estimated that there are two job vacancies for every unemployed person.
Both countries share a common problem - the unemployed do not have the skills to fill those vacancies.
Aussies like to win
The Aussies aren't mucking about and have come up with a solution – grant more resident visas and quickly.
Their recent changes to policy and quota settings mean a majority of highly skilled migrants can get into Australia with permanent residence without needing a job first, without the support of a state or territorial government, and without leaving home.
In New Zealand the residence options are extremely limited to a small number of migrants in a small number of occupations (around 58).
The Government promises them six week processing and “fast tracking” to residence – once they have found a job.
Many others, including nurses, not only have to get a job, they have to work for two years before being afforded the privilege to apply for residence.
As anyone sitting overseas knows, getting a job in New Zealand (or Australia) when you don't have existing work rights is extremely difficult.
New Zealand however is persisting with this model, albeit for an extremely limited number of occupations.
For the other hundreds of occupations New Zealand is desperately short of people for, there is no residence option today – their only option is a work visa after they have found a job.
That relies on the New Zealand employer being willing to spend 2-3 months on a laborious, uncertain and red-tape-filled process to secure a work visa.
It gets worse for New Zealand
Immigration NZ is still only halfway through processing the 100,000 resident visa applications that they promised would be 'fast tracked' from December 2021.
That suggests based on current processing times it will be at least the middle of 2023 before these cases are finalised. The NZ Government clearly doesn’t define “fast track” the way you or I would.
The immigration department has neither the capacity nor the capability of taking on more work. I believe one of the delays in the Government making any substantive announcement is fear that the immigration department will collapse.
Therefore, we are unlikely to see any points system for a few more months. I will predict that whenever they announce it, it won’t actually kick off for a few months after that. My pick would be early to mid 2023.
In the meantime, the Australians are ramping up and stealing the march on New Zealand. Many of our clients are going to ride that wave (and potentially use that visa as the back door to New Zealand).
The current war for talent is global and it is real. And New Zealand is in real danger of losing it.