Let's concentrate on the real election issues

By RICHARD BEDFORD*

Winston Peters made a good point in his speech about the right to speak out on immigration. Immigration is not a sideshow. It goes to the heart of who we are as New Zealanders.

Over the next 50 years, immigration will play a more important role in determining the composition of our workforce and our society as levels of natural increase fall with sustained low fertility.

Despite this well-accepted fact, Mr Peters misses the point when he says immigration is the real issue of this election. I am not being politically correct or influenced by dictates of misguided politeness, as he accuses the media of being, when I say this.

Immigration - for once, at election time - is tracking pretty much as the politicians of the major parties have wanted it to track since the late 1990s. There are net gains of people rather than net losses.

It should be recalled that at the last election in 1999, it was the emigration of New Zealanders that was an issue some tried to politicise, arguing that we needed a more positive immigration policy.

This year, the economic component of residence approvals (people in the general skills and business categories) accounts for more than 60 per cent of people selected on the basis of points for residence. The last National Government sought to increase the proportion of economic migrants, and the present Government has introduced policies to achieve this.

The immigrant selection criteria are more stringent than when New Zealand First was in coalition with the National Party in 1997 and 1998. Immigration is not out of control, even though record numbers of people are entering the country in what is called the permanent and long-term (PLT) migration category.

Included in the PLT arrivals are the largest numbers of returning New Zealanders for more than a decade, as well as significant numbers of people on two- or three-year work permits.

Much of the immigration is not people seeking to settle in New Zealand; it is skilled people taking up jobs that they have arranged either before entering the country or while they are here as visitors.

A significant component of people of Asian ethnicity, whom Mr Peters notes have doubled in a decade, are students in New Zealand's burgeoning international education industry.

About 45,000 overseas students, mainly from countries in Asia, are receiving secondary and tertiary education in New Zealand.

The biggest increase in the Asian population in Mr Peters' electorate has come from marketing education opportunities, something which most of those concerned with economic growth in Tauranga favour.

Mr Peters is right: the issue of immigration is important. It is an issue that needs to be talked about. But the conversation needs to be balanced by considered assessment of the statistics and the implications of an increasingly diverse society for New Zealand's future.

Empty rhetoric does not further the debate, and I suspect it is this sort of rhetoric that has produced the deafening silence to his comments and questions that Winston Peters finds so hard to accept.

When a politician states in the speech that launches his party's election campaign that he wants to slash the number of immigrants flooding into New Zealand to 10,000, less than a fifth of the present rate, one has to wonder how seriously his arguments can be taken.

As the Minister of Immigration pointed out, there would be a net loss of people from New Zealand if the number of approvals was restricted to 10,000. Since the points system was introduced in 1991, there has never been less than 20,000 approvals in any one year. In 1999 and 2000, when there were net migration losses, approvals were running at more than 30,000 a year.

High levels of immigration do put pressure on existing services and, if the mix of immigrants in terms of culture and colour is very different from the host society, immigration does pose challenges for social cohesion. But this has always been the immigration story; it is an enduring legacy of settlement by non-Maori in New Zealand.

The diversity of views about immigration that Mr Peters stresses in his speeches is not surprising; there is little consensus across generations and ethnic groups about many aspects of contemporary society.

However, this diversity of view is not a cause for alarm or an issue that needs to be exploited just at the time of an election. It is something that the Heraldregularly features in substantive articles about immigration and the transformation of New Zealand's society and economy.

The quality of reporting on immigration issues has risen considerably. There is no evidence for the claim that the big-city media have decided that immigration is not a fit topic for discussion.

It is the readers who have decided that many of the issues and questions that Mr Peters has raised in his election speeches do not merit the sensational sort of response that he is seeking.

Health, education, crime and economic direction are the real election issues, not immigration.

* Professor Richard Bedford is the Deputy Vice-Chancellor (research) and convenor of the migration research group at Waikato University's population studies centre. He is also an adviser to the ministerial advisory group on immigration.

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