Prime Minister Christopher Luxon has flagged controls on immigration as a way to tackle infrastructure and housing gaps.
Net migration spiked to 118,000 over the past year, in part to fill job shortages after two years of closed borders because of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Before 2020 net migration was about 60,000 people a year, but Mr Luxon wouldn’t say what was an ideal migration number.
“It’s actually hard for any government to lay up a hard and fast number. What we’ve got to do is make sure is any migration is linked very strongly to those worker shortages. We can’t always control Kiwis returning. What we’ve got to do is make sure we get the settings right. They’ve gone from being way too restrictive to way too loose and we’ve got to find that balance,” Mr Luxon says.
Immigration Minister Erica Stanford is revising migration settings.
