Groser Tim: General Debate 
Groser Tim: General Debate 
[Volume:643;Page:13296] 
TIM GROSER (National) 
: 
 New Zealanders who are actually interested in the future of this country might be excused for thinking that the record exodus of New Zealanders from this country would constitute some type of wake-up call to this Government but I fear they will be proven wrong. I do not believe that this Government—wrapped in its own bubble and in its hermetically sealed zone of ignorance arrogance and fantasy—is listening to New Zealanders any more. Whether it involves fundamental departures from our democratic polity such as the introduction of a bill governing future elections without full non-partisan consideration; whether it concerns the politicisation of the Public Service; or in this case whether it concerns the undermining of the economic sovereignty of this country this Government lives in its hermetically sealed bubble and essentially is no longer listening to the signals that are coming to it. This exodus is a signal of paramount importance. 
The Government believes that the good years from 2000 to 2005 were somehow miraculously associated with the election of Labour. That is totally ignoring the facts such as that in the preceding year the growth rate was 4.3 percent. We had fantastic labour productivity growth rates of 3.5 percent from 1997 to 2000 which powered this economy along in the first 5 years after that. Not even the Labour Government was capable of eating into that growth dividend. But eventually with the cumulative impact of soft-core populist policies and of failing to put in place wealth creation policies yes the chickens are coming home to roost. 
Our growth rate has tanked to 2 percent while Australia’s growth rate is running at over 4 percent. It is 5 percent if we take out the negative effects of the Australian drought. Australia’s growth rate has accelerated above 3 percent. What is the consequence? The consequence is that New Zealanders are voting with their feet in record numbers. 
Rather than focus on the overall figure I want to focus on the exodus of Maori from New Zealand. I want to focus on the disturbing but quite interesting exodus of Maori from New Zealand. If we go back and look at reports from the Australian Bureau of Statistics we will find that a mere 20 years ago in 1986 the Australian Bureau of Statistics estimated that there were 27000 Australian residents of Maori ethnic origin. If we fast-forward 20 years—a mere blip in the history of any people—we find that there are nearly 100000 Australian residents of Maori ethnic origin or around 15 percent of the Maori population. Worse than that the trend is accelerating. So even if we took the absurdly optimistic assumption that the number if present trends continue might only double such that one-third of the Maori population of this country in 20 years hence will be living in Australia that is the figure we start from. 
There is another way of looking at it. Of the absolute increase in the Kiwi-born population in Australia counting all those who are Kiwi-born an astonishing 60 percent of the increase since 2000 are Maori. Why are they leaving New Zealand? They are leaving—and their exodus is accelerating—because this economy has slowed down. This Government has given up on the policies of wealth creation and gone down the tired route of the politics of redistribution. 
This then leads to an interesting but disturbing thought. If we go back to consider the origins of the great migration of the indigenous people of this country the tangata whenua we know originally from Austronesian language links but now from DNA that it started in what we call modern-day Taiwan. Although we obviously cannot go back and interview those people we can make the assumption that they began their great migration in the search for a better life. They did not set off 2000 years ago saying “Let’s go to Aotearoa.” They set off on a great island-hopping expedition that went through the Indonesian Malay archipelago over 2000 years and the largest single number of them arrived in what we today call Aotearoa. 
But has it ever occurred to people that perhaps this migration has not stopped and that Aotearoa might not be the final landing place for Maori? The search for a better life is clearly continuing.