Erica Stanford

We've already done that.

We are much harsher on acceptable standards of health and much harsher on, hey, you need to have skills.

You need to have English language and you need to be a net benefit to New Zealand.

Look I think it's clearly an election year and this is

what happens and I possibly stupidly thought that immigration wouldn't be an issue this year because of the incredible work that we've done over the last two years to get things under control.

We inherited an absolute nightmare from Labour with 70% low skilled workers, 135,000 net migration on the back of the largest residence programme we've had in New Zealand history in such a short time.

230,000 people given residence with no health checks, no English language required

It was a disaster.

And we have cleaned up that mess in the last two years.

And we're in a really good space now.

Possibly.

25, 26 is our long term sort of average.

And of course, it's cyclical.

So it goes with the economy.

When the economy is doing well, we need more migrants to fill skills and

the numbers rise and when obviously the economy is not doing well, like it wasn't for the last couple of years, it reduces.

And we were at risk of actually dropping below, you know, dropping to zero and we're having negative net migration.

We managed to avoid that.

But the key thing for me is that in the last two years, we have flipped the skill level around.

So now 70% of the people coming in are highly skilled.