Mediawatch: Immigration Amping Up In Election Year

Colin
Peacock, Senior Producer and Mediawatch
Presenter

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.

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’s Audrey
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.

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