Spin Alert

The PM does some nice spin in trying to talk down that so many Kiwis are leaving to live in Australia. After trashing Australia she said “more people were coming to settle in New Zealand than were leaving to live elsewhere – positive net migration”.

Now does this negate that net immigration to Australia is negative? No. It simply means that more people from other countries are coming to live in NZ than there are NZers leaving to Australia.

Let’s look at the actual stats. We have them to 31 Jan 2006. Overall 78,660 permanent arrivals for the year. Three years ago it was 96,240 and has been dropping every year since. Permanent departures were 71,700 and three years ago was only 57,190.

So yes net migration inwards of 6,960 but three years ago was 39,050 – a massive drop. Not a good trend Prime Minister.

Noe let us look just at Australia. 13,325 people moved here from there in the last year. And the number who left to move to Australia was 34,764. This by the way is a huge increase of around 10,000 from just two years ago.