Kerre Woodham: Our infrastructure cant keep up with migration

I was reading Robert Mcculloch's most excellent “Down to Earth Kiwi” blog.  

His latest piece is an article on mass immigration and making the premise that high net immigration will ultimately dilute the influence of indigenous people on the future of a country. That the more people we have coming in with different cultures, different priorities, the less importance the views of indigenous people have on the future of the country, and we can get back to that, and the Treaty, and the debate over whether we should be having a debate on the Treaty closer to Waitangi Day.   

But what I was more interested in today, given the other stories that are in the news cycle, is a discussion on immigration. Net immigration is running between 2-3% of the population per annum. That's around about 120,000 people annually that we have to accommodate, literally and metaphorically. Immigration is back to higher levels than it was even during the John Key years.  

Now Labour tried and failed to deliver an economy and a skilled workforce that did not rely on imported labour. They said that we would be able to train enough Kiwis to fill the vacancies that were available and that became patently obvious almost immediately that that wasn't going to happen. We simply couldn't do it. Whether it was we couldn't do it quickly enough or we couldn't do it at all. My guess is we couldn't do it at all.  

It became very apparent that there simply weren't enough Kiwi’s able and willing to do the jobs we needed to keep New Zealand Inc. running, and they were jobs right across the board. Remember when we had pensioners who were packing up their cars in their caravans and heading off to Hawkes Bay in Central Otago to pick fruit? We had waiting lists blowing out with a completely stretched and overworked health force staff screaming for reinforcements. So, it was right across the board.  

In the news today, we hear that rents are high and they're rising. In Wellington, the water infrastructure is completely and utterly poked. In Auckland our beaches were closed for days over the Christmas break because of sewage overflows into the water, which is an absolute disgrace.  

Spending on improving our housing supply, our infrastructure, our health, our education, has not kept pace with the inflow of new New Zealanders. We wouldn't even be able to look after the needs of existing New Zealanders.  

We've allowed infrastructure, particularly that under the ground, to get run down to a point that it's going to be astronomically expensive to fix. We haven't freed up the space and the regulatory environment to allow more homes to be built, maybe because we're rightly concerned given past experience of the quality of the homes that will be built and we're concerned about where they're being built. Auckland Anniversary floods, anybody? House prices are predicted to rise again as demand outstrips supply.  

So, what to do, what to do?  

If we put a hold on immigration, as Labour did, and indeed, as most governments did during the Covid years, all the same problems we saw, above and beyond managing Covid, will happen again. The waiting lists will blow out, the people needed to build the necessary infrastructure can't be found here. We simply can't put 30 migrant workers into a three-bedroom home. No, we don't do that here, thank you.  

So, what to do? The myth that New Zealand can look after its own needs has been well and truly busted after two years with closed borders, but what do we do? We bring in the people we need to do the jobs and where do we put them? What do we do with what they produce that we need to get rid of?  How do we fix what's under the ground without bringing in more people to do it?  

It's a conundrum, and if you have the answer, I'll buy you a Lotto ticket. 

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