New Zealand should tighten its liberal immigration policies and concentrate on improving the skills of its own workforce following the Covid-19 pandemic, the nation’s deputy prime minister has said.
Winston Peters, who is also the country’s foreign minister, told the Financial Times that the pandemic had exposed the problems of building an economy on consumption driven by immigration.
“To bring in numbers on the basis of consumption is a flawed economic policy and was bound to fail and it did fail. And the moment Covid-19 turned up, which was always a foreseeable event, we then saw the need to upskill and train our people first,” he said.