The number of New Zealand citizens returning home from overseas is starting to taper off

Largely the last 12 months of house price inflation was due to rates falling to historic lows and RBNZ loosening lending restrictions.

But it would be foolish to look at the last 12 months of migration in a vacuum. Over the past 24 months we have had annual net migration of around 45k per year, which is historically very high and has overall exasperated the housing shortage. Given another 12 months of low net migration, and high construction levels, we may actually start to see the erosion of the shortage.

Greed is good.

"Human greed it seems has no limits".

Please don't tell me you've just worked this out.

I'm just here for my daily glass of whine

the issue with housing is not simply numbers - as we certainly built way more housing than required for 5000 people -- but the policies around housing which have led to increased compliance costs, the loss of landlords ability to reclaim their own homes -- and a 30% rise in house prices -- Why bother complying and renting to potentially difficult tenants when you can make 8-10 yrs rent in capital gains in the year ! lots more empty homes about and lots more scrutiny on who people rent to! All of which was predicted in the advice given to government before they made those changes and before they lent the back 10 billion interest free which was passed on to speculators -- nothing here should be a surprise

But...
https://imgur.com/qG08rLa

Instead of net migration change, we have to look at who came in ? Mostly Kiwis returning from overseas, for settling here, bringing their money and buying houses here. They pushed up the house prices by a major factor. Rest are investment property buyers and a small percentage of FHBs propelled by the low mortgage rates.

No CGT, no problems.

Good spot! Just submit an OIA request for that information. :-)

Further to that, in the monthly report this article reports on, Statistics NZ has put in some massive adjustments to reported immigration numbers from 13-16 months ago. It looks like rather than sticking to their standard 12/16 model for calculating immigration numbers, they've introduced some big adjustments. Arguably fair enough to adjust as some folk who stayed 13 or 14 months never intended to emigrate from their homelands, and were all-but trapped here by fear of the epidemic. Conveniently for their minister, this puts an outflow of 4467 people outside the widely reported 12 month rolling net immigration total, obfuscating the net outflow of people from New Zealand over the last six months.

They were thinking: "Brining in more people gives a boost to nominal GDP, and makes us look like we are running a successful economy".

What they weren't thinking "What are the long term ramifications on our infrastructure, how do we pay for it, and does this improve the lives of the average New Zealander".

Remember that this was a government who came to office on a platform of, among other things, reduced immigration.

Look what happened to the graph around 2017.

Scares me to think how much our public health system, already struggling to keep up, would falter if it loses a few dozen experienced medical staff. Add to that, the plan to add demand by resuming low-skilled migration in a few months' time.

https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/health/126048349/burnt-out-doctors-and…

Does that mean we get all our NZ doctors back from overseas also?

Maybe it's time to make training to be a doctor more accessible? There's been far too much exclusivisation of the healthcare trades by the incumbents.

The data already includes returning Kiwis, assuming they'd been living overseas.

Employing immigrants on an essential skills work visa requires they be paid at minimum $25.50 per hour.
I employ 2 of them, latest one employed only about 6 weeks ago, very difficult to get staff currently and this is for basic warehousing & van driving positions.

Yes, yes I agree. But we have to be allowed to build houses for them to live.

You are missing the problem. I agree that the overwhelming majority of people who i've met who have immigrated to NZ are great people.

The problem is the rate of immigration and that lack of planning done to provide the infrastructure and housing needed to support an expanding population.

Would you say immigration is good if we continued to provide no additional infrastructure but had net inflows of 500k a year? What about 1 million per year?

Its not a case of immigration being good or bad, its about it being done in a way that it works within the bounds of our infrastructure and ability to support a growing population.

Nothing wrong with immigration if its done within the framework of zero population growth.

That’s because it’s illegal to build stuff, not the immigrants.

You could say that about almost any resource. More immigration means less per person within New Zealand.

That's what makes me laugh about these targets to reduce carbon emissions to pre-1990 levels. In 1990 this country only had 3.3m people.

NZ total annual energy demand actually peaked more than a decade ago, so despite a decade of high immigration the total amount of electricity used in a year has actually fallen over that time. What the issue in 2021 is is that generators have not created enough peak time power buffer (could have easily done this with large battery farm like was done in Australia), and still struggling to secure base load capacity in dry years.

I have to say, I'm skeptical about your numbers. You're only accounting for residential electricity usage, and have come up with an extra ~1.7% of the population needing a 4% increase in our total electricity generation. Not sure what the error is but it doesn't smell right - possibly some units confusion.

More generally though, I agree adding more people doesn't help our infrastructure issues.

lol, stop dreaming, come back to reality..

what the old and wealthy come in and the young and ambitious leave. A retirement village with no one to look after the.

Hopefully six figures leaving for Australia and our population begins dropping. To many people here already, the country is getting overrun.

Yep it'll be open slather once it's deemed safe. A hundred thousand low skill immigrants? What could go wrong?

Is this one of the considerations for Amazon to leave NZ? Getting too hard to do business here, cost of living etc?

Why would these people stay when their salaries will not get them int a home comparative to their professions?

Something mr orr doesn see to 'get'.

Unemployment will increase if that happens. Immigration creates jobs.

Why do you think so many people feel such sentiment about New Zealand? You seem to dismiss the problem as just "miserable people"?

There are 1500 properties being completed in Auckland each month at the moment, probably around 4000 across the country, the annual 5,000 can be easily housed by new properties with just one month of new builds.

That was the narrative, at least. There’s no evidence of it

I had heard this has been debunked. Do they even have stats on this. The elephant in the room is all the empty ghost houses and those used for temporary weekenders etc, but that has been denied without there being any stats

All require taxation to pay for them, and if you want more of them, then you have to be prepared to pay for it.

Largely agree, although the same could be said of National. Personally thought the quality of media performance under Key was shocking Perhaps it's a media thing, rather than partisanship? Mainstream media just suck. It is their job to sell advertising slots and get bums on seats, rather than offend the purchasers of whatever they're hawking with unpleasant truths. Worried people don't buy, except maybe alcohol and firearms?