Infometrics Principal Economist Brad Olsen puts the surge in people arriving in New Zealand down to a COVID-19 hangover of when our borders were shut and also a labour shortage facing the country at the time. 

“We’ve seen the largest migration boom that New Zealand has ever seen,” Olsen told AM on Monday morning.  

“We were sort of adding, I think, a Taupō’s worth of people every second month or so, that’s contributed to the largest population gain New Zealand has ever seen since the end of the Second World War, since 1946.”  

Olsen told AM the migration boom is adding “pretty significant stresses” to the rest of the country as New Zealand’s infrastructure, such as hospitals, houses and schools, struggles to keep up.  

But that boom could be ending with Olsen believing the figures have plateaued.  

“If we look at the latest data from Stats NZ, for example, although we’re not seeing it sort of shift down particularly rapidly, the migration figures do seem to suggest that we might be around that sort of plateau. In fact, it might have been around October last year that was sort of the peak of that annual growth,” Olsen told AM co-host Lloyd Burr.  

This hasn’t stopped the Government from planning changes to the immigration settings with Finance Minister Nicola Willis saying the door is currently open to too many low-skilled workers. 

But Olsen said the current boom in migration is what the industry and the Government had been calling for.  

“I think the challenge a little bit is that it’s also what the Government had been asking for and importantly, what industry had been asking for as well. They said, ‘Look, we need workers to work in tourism operations and accommodation and food services, so let’s bring these people in’,” Olsen said.