More migrants idea ‘absurd’

Press, 12 July 1984, Page 4

More migrants idea ‘absurd’

PA Gisborne Labour’s leader, Mr Lange, last evening dismissed as “ludicrous” a suggestion that his party would encourage unskilled migrants to New Zealand. “It is ludicrous to suggest that we are proposing to flood, from any country in the world, this already-over-stretched labour market,” he said in Gisborne.

Anyone with any intelligence would never dream of encouraging people with no particular skills to come to New Zealand at a time when there were 102,000 people unemployed or on special work. “You’ve just got to be nuts to think of it,” Mr Lange said.

Earlier this week the Prime Minister told an Oamaru audience that the Labour member of Parliament, Mr Richard Prebble, had said the Government’s immigration policy was wrong because it discriminated against Pacific Islanders. Sir Robert Muldoon quoted Mr Prebble as saying Labour would allow more Pacific Island

migrants. “I think he is totally wrong to increase Pacific Island immigration at the present time when we are trying to get unemployment down. We will not bring unemployment down if we open the gates to more unskilled labour,” Sir Robert said.

Mr Lange told 450 people in the Gisborne Boys’ High School hall that New Zealanders needed the security of knowing Labour would fight a campaign against unemployment. “They must now recognise that it was the third Labour Government that actually set in place the restrictions on immigration that this Government now operates,” he said. “We did it when in 1973 we realised there was such a huge movement of people from the United Kingdom to New Zealand and there was very considerable stress put on housing and social services.”

The immigration had not been from the South Pacific but from Britain. He said what the Government was trying to do was

to get people to see a prospect of people trying to seek jobs from overseas “and trying to forget or make you forget there is a horde of New Zealanders seeking jobs.” “Now you start to worry about them, not the people who are more than 12,000 miles away,” Mr Lange said.

Gisborne had the highest rate of unemployment in New Zealand. “Do you think for one moment we are going to bring people in to add to that total? It is just absolutely absurd,” he said. Mr Lange said that tackling unemployment would be the biggest and most important task of an incoming Labour Government. “It will not be an easy task. Unemployment cannot be wiped out overnight and nobody believes that it can be,” he said. Unemployment had taken its tightest grip in the provinces. This year one in five school-leavers went straight into the dole queue. He said that in the year

ended March, 1984, $316 million was spent on dole

payments. The National Party presided over the fastest rise in registered unemployment in the western world. During the last election, it talked of an additional 410,000 jobs during the 1980 s. There were now 5200 fewer jobs than when those promises were made, Mr Lange said. He described National’s employment policies as no more than a desperate series of ad-hock measures based on the ill-founded hope that unemployment would disappear. Mr Lange said getting back to full employment was a task that would require more than one term in office. It would take the unified efforts of New Zealanders from all parties and sectors “to haul our way out of this mess.” Labour, in partnership with the private sector, would create jobs, many of them in the regions. It would implement an active labour market policy that would monitor employment trends and introduce policies to prevent unemployment growing, he said.

“We want to get away from the absurd situation where we have to bring in skilled labour from other countries at a time when over 100,000 New Zealanders are unemployed,” Mr Lange said.

Assistance would be directed to those who needed it most — schoolleavers, those out of work for a long time, and to regions where unemployment was particularly high. Regional employment priority areas would be set up in Northland, South Auckland, Rotorua, Gisborne and Christchurch with the amount of assistance directly related to the local unemployment level.

Mr Lange criticised tne School-leavers Training Employment Programme (S.T.E.P.S.) which he said had been touted as the answer to youth unemployment.

He believed its philosophy was fundamentally fraudulent. In the first nine months fewer than one in four trainees went on to an unsubsidised job.