The debate over New Zealand’s high immigration program continues to bubble with The Greens yesterday calling for New Zealand to adopt a 1% population growth target that smooths-out big swings in immigration. From Interest.co.nz:
Co-Leader James Shaw has proposed changing migration settings in a dynamic way to ensure the population grew 1% per year, rather than the 2% growth seen last year…
“We think that the country needs a more sustainable immigration policy, so what we would do is to set a variable approvals target based on a percentage of the overall population, and so that would be at about 1% of the population, which is historically how fast New Zealand’s population has grown,” Shaw said.
“So what we would do is we’d say, well, if you look at a period like at the moment, when you’ve got lots of Kiwis coming home and not many leaving, then the number of approvals would be much lower, and in other years it would be much higher,” he said.
Given the current population, that would imply population growth of around 45,000, including the migration home and away of New Zealanders to and from overseas, which cannot be restricted, along with natural population growth. Shaw said the 1% population growth policy would mean that net migration of non-New Zealand citizens would therefore be around 17,000 to 20,000 migrants this year, down from the current net migration of around 70,000.
The Greens’ policy is similar to the New Zealand First, who has called for net migration of around 10,000 to 15,000. Either way, it would represent a significant reduction in immigration from current levels of around 70,000 and population growth of 2.1% (see below charts).
The interesting thing in all of this is that the rate of population growth in Australia has easily surpassed New Zealand’s (and other English-speaking OECD nations) over the past 15 years (see below charts).
As shown above, Australia’s population grew by a whopping 26% over the 15 years to 2015, versus 17% in New Zealand and just 11% across the entire OECD.
And yet amazingly, the self-proclaimed guardians of the environment, the Australian Greens, have been completely silent about this turbo-charged population growth, despite environmental organisations like the Australian Conservation Foundation calling for Australia’s population to be stabilised and nominating human population growth as a “key threatening process” to Australia’s biodiversity.
It’s time for the Australian Greens to follow their New Zealand cousins and stand-up for the Australian environment against rapid population growth.
