Source: Radio New Zealand
Henry Cooke in The Post last week analysing responses to the free trade agreement with India. The Post
A recent European industry summit at a chateau in Belgium wasn’t expected to make headlines.
But when British boss Sir Jim Ratcliffe complained to Sky News UK about “huge levels of immigrants coming in”, it was bulletin-leading stuff in Britain.
“The UK has been colonised by immigrants really. The population of the UK was 58 million in 2020, now it’s 70 million,” said the billionaire founder of the global chemical company INEOS.
He went on to claim the current UK Labour government and its under-pressure leader Sir Keir Starmer lacked the courage to confront that – and rising numbers of people on benefits.
These days men of means criticising the British government is not out of the ordinary – or sounding off about immigration.
Several billionaires backed Brexit and now back Nigel Farage’s new anti-immigration political party Reform which is surging in opinion polls right now.
To its credit, Sky News UK said Sir Jim Ratcliffe was off by about 10m on the UK’s recent population growth – an egregious error for a business tycoon with a ruthless focus on budgets and bottom lines.
A further fact check by the BBC revealed only 6.5 million Britons not working today receive benefits – not the 9 million Ratcliffe claimed.
A billboard depicting INEOS Chairman and Manchester United shareholder Sir Jim Ratcliffe, near Old Trafford stadium, in Manchester. AFP
The fact Sir Jim Ratcliffe himself migrated to Monaco for tax reasons – not paying tax being the main one – amplified outrage in the UK.
And Ratcliffe’s blurt made back-page headlines as well as front-page ones because he is also the part-owner of Manchester United. Many of its players, staff and supporters are either immigrants or the children of immigrants.
(NZ Rugby could have been dragged into this too, but Ratcliffe controversially backed out of its INEOS sponsorship deal in mid-2025.)
Guardian sportswriter Barney Ronay was not surprised by the comments.
“He knows that a slash-and-burn Reform government would be good for business. Immigration is just a wedge issue in this dynamic. This is pre-electioneering on behalf of the super wealthy.”
Wedging immigration into party politics
The anti-immigration One Nation party is polling above 20 percent nationally in Australia. That’s more than the Liberal and National parties of the centre-right put together.
Here, the proposed free trade agreement (FTA) with India has pumped immigration up the political agenda.
When the Prime Minister announced an agreement had been reached with India just before Christmas, NZ First issued a statement criticising it.
Winston Peters told Richard Harman’s subscriber news service Politik that family members of about 5000 people on a new employment visa would be eligible to come to New Zealand.
“You go from saying it’s one child – that’s 10,000 people – to possibly 25,000 or more. They’re not the most populous country in the world for nothing,” Peters told Politik.
“It’s an open secret around Parliament that Peters wants to campaign this year on immigration,” Richard Harman concluded at the time, noting that the NZ First statement condemning the FTA attracted a stream of racist comments on social media.
Two months on, that’s no secret anymore.
“On the question of immigration, which is going to be massive in this matter, the truth is not being told. It means we can have tens of thousands of people getting here by right …taking those opportunities away from New Zealanders,” Peters told the Herald’s Ryan Bridge show at the end of January.
The next day the Prime Minister told reporters Peters was wrong and trade minister Todd McClay later told RNZ that NZ First had pulled support for the India FTA before he’d actually secured it.
But the problem for the news media was the terms deal with India still weren’t clear.
What’s the deal?
Last month the Herald’sAudrey Young reported an Indian government fact-sheet had said that the agreement removes caps on Indian students here – but the Trade Minister Todd McLay had already told Parliament that it doesn’t.
And last week, Todd McClay couldn’t confirm that.
In a long sit-down chat on last Sunday’s TVNZ Q+A show, host Jack Tame repeatedly asked if the total number of temporary Indian migrants in New Zealand will increase.
McLay said the FTA doesn’t extend the rights of visa holders to bring relatives in, though most temporary migrants can after a period of time anyway – and New Zealand doesn’t discriminate.
“It appears sometime in the last two weeks the government has decided that – unlike almost all other temporary work visas… that for some reason this visa that applies only to Indians will mean that people cannot bring their families,” Tame asked, hinting that NZ First’s stance could explain the change.
“Under the Free Trade Agreement there is no right extended further. This is something that a government could do in the future if it wants,” McClay countered.
Last week, the Herald’s Audrey Young helped with a point-by-point summary headed Fact or fiction: Who’s telling the truth on the India free trade agreement?.
That followed Herald political editor Thomas Coughlan clearing things up after obtaining part of the yet-to-be published agreement’s text.
But the lack of clarity had allowed anti-immigration advocates to make hay.
Immigration angst
Last week, The Post’s deputy political editor Henry Cooke noted just 5 percent named “immigration” as a worry issue in the most recent IPSOS issues monitor poll – and a later opinion poll showed majority public support for the FTA.
But simply posting results of the latter online surfaced “seething prejudice and racism one finds against Indians online right now, right here in New Zealand.”
“It is possible that anti-immigration sentiment has ticked up now that this deal has huge prominence in news media, with Winston Peters standing against it and Labour slowly finding its way to probably supporting it,” Cooke wrote.
It’s not hard to find concerns about cultural decline and references to racist replacement theory in the output of local alternative media.
“You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to know that if you dilute a culture up to a particular point, that culture disappears,” Reality Check Radio’s Paul Brennan said recently while also insisting the media ignore that issue.
On the same platform, after Winston Peters first sounded the alarm earlier this year, self-described Christian nationalist William McGimpsey said the India Free Trade Agreement has “significant migration risks” Under the heading: Is mass immigration tearing at the social fabric of New Zealand? McGimpsey reckoned 20 percent of people living in New Zealand were not citizens. And some should “politely be asked to leave to reduce the size of the immigrant population to manageable levels and reclaim our country.”
McGimpsey listed news stories that he claimed “show the problems that occur when people from foreign cultures with different values and ways of life are imported here.”
He cited reports of Auckland area beaches stripped of seafood.
This week NZ First’s Shane Jones announced a ban on collecting kaimoana from rock pools along Auckland’s east coast for two years to crack down on what he called “turbocharged foraging.”
On The Platform, host Sean Plunket had no qualms about asking Shane Jones if the problem was created by “recent arrivals to New Zealand.”
“I’ve already said in other parts of the media landscape, that this is a Peking duck problem. We have groups organised via social media on Chinese language sites,” he said.
“I’m coming under attack for my remarks. I don’t care. The vast majority of New Zealanders have been excluded from discussion as to who decided to change the demography of our country,” Jones added.
“I don’t care if I come on your programme or anywhere in New Zealand and I get called out as a racist. You watch me campaign on this issue, buddy,” he told Plunket.
Debating immigration out loud
While some say the media ignores the issue, immigration had aired extensively often in the news.
Unconstrained immigration. What’s the alternative? was the title of a session at the annual New Zealand Economics Forum at the University of Waikato last week.
It also raised the rather clunky question: ‘How do we grow without losing who we are?’
“In an election year, it’s so predictable that immigration becomes a really contested issue,” Tahu Kukutai from the Te Ngira Institute for Population Research told the forum.
“On the one hand we really need skilled migrant labour to fuel our economy. On the other hand… we don’t want m migrants, you know? ‘They’re changing our country.’ That sort of polarised view on immigration is really unhelpful,” she said.
The panel chair Josie Pagani said a recent UN study predicted a halving of the population by the end of the century in more than 20 developed countries.
Leading demography expert Professor Paul Spoonley said New Zealand’s fertility rate was 25 percent below where it needed to be for our population replacement.
Treasury Secretary Ian Rennie made headlines with warnings of the Silver Tsunami on its way. And he said 20 to 40 percent of New Zealand graduates were migrating, often in their peak years of productivity.
On Newstalk ZB, host Mike Hosking agreed – but had a different interpretation of our migration problem.
“Immigrants have replaced our kids. We’ve been dumbed down. Our brightest haven’t been replaced with America’s brightest or Europe’s brightest, but from countries like India and the Philippines. We’re exporting scientists and doctors and bringing in nurses and baristas,” he said.
But it isn’t just scientists leaving and kitchenhands coming in. Some migrants from India and the Philippines do have urgently needed skills – and plenty of people with middling work skills are leaving the country too.
But Hosking was at pains to say: “I love immigration.”
“But we are being forced into this. Not long ago, our net gain was in excess of 100,000 a year. We brought them in and the good ones didn’t leave. See, I figure we can recapture all of that, but a mindset shift is needed.”
Part of that mind shift could be being really clear about what you mean by ‘good’ ones and ‘bad.’
In The Post this week, columnist Dave Armstrong pointed out the unintended consequences of the immigration bar being raised.
Dozens of immigrant bus drivers who rescued Wellington from its recent bustastrophe might now have to leave the country at the end of their visas because new higher English language standards brought in recently will be tough to meet.
“By all means, spend money to train good, dependable bus drivers from New Zealand, but in the meantime, it seems madness to send perfectly good bus drivers home because they didn’t complete a 300-word essay to the standard of a postgraduate university student,” Armstrong wrote.
Whether we’re breeding bus drivers or brain surgeons here, it’s taking longer.
Fresh figures out this week also showed that just 14 percent of births were to mothers younger than 25. And as the gap between generations grows, living together under one roof is also in the up
On Newstalk ZB, Heather Du Plessis-Allan asked Paul Spoonley to ask if this was immigration at work as well.
“You’ve got people from countries like India where, for example, where it is absolutely fine and it’s normal. Or is this actually us, like native New Zealanders, people who’ve been here for a few generations also starting to do this?” she asked.
“No, it’s us. There are definitely some cultural practices, but no – it’s us. We’re changing,” he said.
The ‘us’ and ‘them’ was a little awkward there – and a reminder of just how few of ‘them’ are heard when ‘we’ in the media cover this issue.
Last Wednesday Winston Peters interrupted Green MP Teanau Tuiono to ask why “someone from Rarotonga” should say ‘Aotearoa’.
Teanau Tuiono was born here in New Zealand.
Accused of racism and scapegoating, Winston Peters told Parliament the next day he wasn’t sorry.
But by then his deputy, Shane Jones had gone further – and cruder – NZME’s rural show The Country.
“We are going to continue to remind Kiwis that unfettered immigration is going to fatefully change the trajectory and the character of our nation. And we’re not having it and people are not campaigning on it,” Jones bullishly told host Jamie McKay.
“You’re just being racist. Some of these Indians who might be migrants here will do the work that some of the drug addled Northlanders won’t do,” McKay countered.
Mackay, who also cited Filipinos sustaining dairy farming and Catholic churches in the south.
“But we don’t need any more Uber drivers,” Jones replied.
“Just because I said that the people that are plundering all the rock pools around Auckland happen to be from the migrant community – and in a playful way I use the term the Orient Express – doesn’t mean that I’m a racist.”
Stereotyping migrants as seafood plunderers and Uber drivers clearly is not ‘playful.’ And whether people think it is racist or not, it is a play for political support.
There will be plenty more of this in our media in election year as NZ First – and others concerned about immigration – make this an issue in terms certain to cause offence and attract media attention.
“It’s not hard to imagine anti-migration politics taking a real hold here,” Henry Cooke warned in The Post last week.
“If our major party politicians want to avoid that, MPs will have to explain why immigration is so crucial to a country facing such a demographic challenge.”
Hopefully the news media will sort fact from fiction as we go – as the Herald and others have done lately with claims about the FTA with India.
And hopefully journalists will also sort the facts about immigration from the opinions of people in politics who seem inspired by those exploiting the issue for political support overseas.
Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero, a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.
– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand
