Kate Hawkesby: Is the glow of NZ as a destination diminishing?

I don’t think the Prime Minister's assurances that New Zealand is a great place to live will have any sway with all the potential overseas workers we could have, who’re choosing to go elsewhere.  Prime Ministers have to be cheerleaders for their country, it’s part of the job description.  They also have to be relentlessly positive, as Ardern is, when it’s a country you’ve been governing for five years and its reputation as a great place has, under your government, gone backwards.  People used to want to come here, and did come here, in their droves - now, not so much. Just one solitary investor has lined up for the new investor category visa.  A system that used to work well and attract wealthy investors, now that they overhauled it for reasons best known to themselves, is so unattractive that only one person has bothered applying.  So we’re not attracting wealth or investment into the country, but nor are we attracting workforce. A recruiter just back from two jobs fairs in the UK said there’s zero interest from people to come here and work.  He says he spoke to more than 300 people and none of them want to come. Why?  He said crime, cost of living, housing prices and that we’ve just made it too hard for them. Slow processing on visa applications, endless delays, and confusion. We’re just not welcoming as a country.  He said people want to go to Australia, Canada or Europe instead. Other countries are making it easier and more attractive to get in, they’re more welcoming, they’re moving faster.  Our immigration moves at the pace of a snail and that’s before we get to the real hard truth of the matter which is that this seems to be an anti-immigration Government.  Which, as one immigration lawyer pointed out yesterday, is fine if the country’s booming and we don’t need it, but we do. We are desperately short of people in every single sector, people are crying out for workers, they just cannot get them, so why the arrogance of thinking we can just keep going without welcoming foreign workers in?  It’s nuts.  It’s also not an answer to say, as the Prime Minister did yesterday, that we have "roughly 70,000 employers with approvals to go out and seek workers to bring in’.  An approval to go out and seek workers is not the same as getting workers in. That’s a political mish-mash of an answer if ever I heard one.  All that says to me is that 70,000 employers are in absolute strife, so much so they’ve jumped through all the bureaucratic hoops and time delays and paperwork to apply to even try to get workers in.  That doesn’t even cover off all the employers who don’t have the time, energy or money to devote to applying for those approvals.  And there’s a big gap between approvals to get workers in and actually getting them in. It’s a classic governmental disconnect between what’s happening out here in the real world, compared to what a piece of paper at the immigration department says.  I just don’t think politicians burying their heads in the sand and saying "oh don’t worry New Zealand’s great!" is going to cut it, when all the stats would say that foreign workers think otherwise. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.