An east Auckland business audience has been given a blunt but optimistic view of New Zealand’s economic and social outlook from the Leader of the Opposition.
Botany MP and National Party leader Christopher Luxon was joined by National’s immigration spokesperson, East Coast Bays MP Erica Stanford, at a breakfast hosted by Business East Tamaki on November 4.
Luxon told the audience of more than 200 people at the Howick Club he’s asked several times a day why he left behind a successful business career to enter politics.
“The question is understandable because the public is very cynical about politicians and politics.
“We promise a lot of stuff and there’s a lot of spin. It’s long on rhetoric but short on substance.”
He said he had two main observations to share from the two years since he became an MP.
The first is that he feels “incredibly optimistic about New Zealand”.
“I think this is the best country on planet Earth.
“We have tremendous unrealised potential, economically, socially, environmentally.”
Luxon said he sees that because as National leader he gets to travel around the country every week meeting people from community organisations and businesses as well as entrepreneurs.
“You realise all of us are in this together and we have this mutual obligation and connectedness as Kiwis to each other.
“It gives me tremendous hope we can get ourselves to a much better place.”
His second observation is he feels “we are totally and utterly heading in the wrong direction as a country”.
“We have to turn it around very strongly and get it back on track and heading in the right direction.
“I’ve done a lot of turnaround jobs in my business career.
“The two things you have to focus on are what are the brutal facts of your reality, as difficult as they might be you’ve got to call them out and face up to them, and then have hope.
“Not in some sort of ‘kumbaya’ way, but you’ve got to have hope because you have a plan to get yourself there.”
Luxon said National wants to focus its economic policies on improving productivity and creating more wealth for the country and high-wage salaries for New Zealanders.
Its social policy will use the social investment approach favoured by former Prime Minister Sir Bill English, he said.
That requires using data to target and make an impact on vulnerable people’s lives to change the trajectory they’re on, “rather than all the things that haven’t been working”.
Luxon also talked about the environment, the billions the current Government is spending in various sectors, its Three Waters policy, and what he called “huge spin, no delivery”, by Labour.
He said New Zealand needs to build a world-class education system, reduce truancy, and get back to teaching the basics in schools.
It also needs to make it easier for businesses to operate and cut regulation and invest more in infrastructure, technology and research and development and in New Zealand’s international connections, he said.
Stanford told the audience there’s a sense of frustration, anxiety and stress among business owners around New Zealand due to the lack of skilled migrants entering the country.
She said Kiwi businesses did everything asked of them over the past two years and now is the time they should be able to fly, “but they can’t due to the constraints they face in terms of staff”.
“Every single country around the world is vying for the same people.
“There is huge competition there for skilled labour.
“If you look at other countries, their immigration settings reflect that.”
Stanford said Australia is aggressively targeting the workers it needs.
“They don’t even require skilled people to have a job in Australia to apply for residence.
“They are aggressively targeting the international students New Zealand forgot about or didn’t want.”
She said the positive thing with immigration is it doesn’t take long to turn such problems around.
“We can pull the right levers to make sure we’re getting the right people in the country.
“Like the nurses. No one can explain why they’re on a two-year pathway to residency.
“The real challenge we’re going to have with immigration in New Zealand is the huge backlog of residency [applications].
“It drove a lot of people away because it takes three or four years to get residency.
“The Government is asleep at the wheel and didn’t gear up Immigration NZ to process visas and that’s why there’s a labour shortage.
“Everywhere I go in every centre of New Zealand, businesses cannot get staff.
“We can turn this around but we have to be focused on getting the immigration settings right.”
