Sigh
Does anyone elses passion for New Zealand die a little bit when they read things like this. Reminds me of all this disappointment.
There is a difference between allowing people into the country when certain skills are “over-subscribed” and we have short term demand or infrastructure issues and this – talking about taking away peoples work permits when they are here because “New Zealander’s should have New Zealand jobs” is inhumane.
Writing that bit in quotations made me feel sick a little 🙁
Update: So this sort of attitude has cross-party support:
Labour leader Phil Goff said it was unacceptable for Kiwi workers to be laid off if they could do the job
Its the labour version of “Buy New Zealand” and makes about as much sense.
@Paul Walker
Indeed, its just in the labour market instead of the goods market 😛
Revoking work permits is going past a minor annoyance though – its messing up peoples lives for the sake of “New Zealand”. I really don’t want to go down that road …
So, in your world, does the government have no role in protecting the (job) security of it’s citizens? Why then have sovereign nations at all? What’s to stop employers from generally hiring a bunch of cheap temporary non-NZers to do all the work in NZ? (I’m thinking mainly semi-/unskilled labour here – the high-skill, short supply roles are a special case). What then do the displaced workers like the welder in this story do? Go on the dole?
Private gain to company through lower labour costs.
Public loss to taxpayers through higher social spending (and lost opportunity to spend on other public goods).
Yeah, that’s a win, all right.
If my company employs some permies to cover regular demand, and some short-term contractors to cover short-term demand, then, when demand declines, the contractors go first, other than in exceptional cases. The difference here is the “contractors” are probably cheaper.
@rainman
Two things:
1) I don’t care about New Zealander’s anymore than I care about other people (although I don’t really like Australians 😛 ). I try to remember that these are all people. As a result, we need a little more that “national sovereignty” to justify biased policy.
2) There are minimum wage laws in the country – if a New Zealander can do the job, they will get the job, as they are shipper to “ship in”. If New Zealander’s are lazy or unproductive and that is why they are losing work then maybe we should be glad they are all moving to Australia.
I would also be careful talking about “dis-placed workers” – there isn’t a limited pool of jobs, if we have productive staff working this creates jobs for other people. If we are only bringing in migrants that work this CREATES JOBS my friend.
Now, I’m even willing to accept that in exceptional circumstances, when other countries are doing it, it may be in the national interest to limit migration. But what they have done is worse than that, they are talking about REVOKING SOMEONES WORK PERMIT for no fault of their own.
They are talking about completely screwing over some peoples lives because “they aren’t New Zealander’s”. That is disgusting – and if that happens I’m looking at leaving the country and finding somewhere that actually respects human rights.
So imigrants are responsible for the economic crisis?
I’m sorry, I thought I was in 1930’s Germany for a minute there.
And Matt – that isn’t exactly cross-party support. That’s National and Labour support from what I can tell. 😛
@goonix
Very true – you should pop that up as a post this morning – I will delay my make work fallacy post 😉
@goonix
There are other parties?
@Nigel
Good point 🙂