Waikato Business News | March 1, 2024

10 MARCH 2024
There has always been great
rivalry, and comradery,
between New Zealand and
Australia. Such competition,
currently continuing on the cricket
pitch, also extends to the world
of migration. In the year to June
2023 Australia had a net migration
gain of 518,000 people, while New
Zealand recorded a gain of 126,000
people in the year to December
2023. During this year New Zealand
also had a net loss of 47,000 NZ
citizens, with over half moving to
Australia.
There are many factors for
migrants to consider when looking
to move “down-under”, with the
two countries’ immigration policies
a primary factor. For families
looking to make a permanent
move, their focus is on obtaining
resident visas which allow then to
live indefinitely in the country, and
to potentially become citizens.
Both countries have skilled
residence programmes to attract
qualified workers and to fill
workforce gaps, and have similar
requirements for good health,
character and English language.
So, what are the main differences
between New Zealand and
Australia’s skilled resident visa
policies?
New Zealand’s flagship workbased
residence visa is the pointsdriven
Skilled Migrant Category
(SMC) for which points can be
claimed for qualifications or
occupational registration or high
income, and additional points
for up to 3 years of NZ skilled
work experience. There are also a
number of skill-shortage roles on
the Green List Tier 1, which can
enable a straight-for-residence
application (no points required).
Additional roles on the Green
List Tier 2, and in some sectors
(eg: care workforce) also provide
a pathway to residence after 2
years of work. All applications
require skilled employment in New
Zealand.
Australia has a large number of
work-based Permanent Residence
visa categories, with many different
streams fed into by different
categories of temporary visas.
The main, and more streamlined,
permanent visa options are visa
ADVERTORIAL
New Zealand v Australia
– with immigration also!
subclasses 189, 190 and 186 (Direct
Stream). Subclasses 189 and 190
are points-driven with a more
complex points system than New
Zealand’s SMC. While New Zealand
requires every applicant to have
skilled employment, this is not the
case in Australia, where there are
options for state-sponsorship and
recognition of skills/contribution
which do not require employment.
Two other significant differences
between the countries’ skilled
residence policies relate to age,
and long-term residence. New
Zealand residence applicants must
Both countries have
skilled residence
programmes to
attract qualified
workers and to fill
workforce gaps.
be under 56 years when applying,
while applicants for Australian
residence must generally be under
45 years. New Zealand applicants
are also normally issued with
Resident Visas which allow travel
as a resident for 2 years initially and
then there is the ability to obtain a
Permanent Resident Visa – a PRV
is a lifelong residence visa with no
expiry date. In contrast Australia
issues a 5 year “permanent resident
visa” which must be renewed every
5 years. New Zealand resident visa
holders are also eligible to vote in
general elections, which is not the
case in Australia.
Another key difference is in
the criteria to become citizens. In
Australia a person must hold a valid
visa for 4 years with the last year
as a permanent resident, whereas
New Zealand requires someone to
have been a resident for 5 years.
So, while the Trans-Tasman
rivalry continues on the cricket
pitch, and the rugby fields, it also
continues with our immigration
policies as both countries seek
to attract much needed skilled
migrants.
YOUR BUSINESS
How to avoid a
world of pain
By JOSH MOORE
If I asked you to think of someone that
you’ve met at a networking event in the last
year, who you would love to have as a client,
who would that be?
Now imagine this: That person is sitting
on their couch this Saturday afternoon,
and a notification pops up on their phone
telling them you’ve sent them a message via
LinkedIn or Facebook. But the problem is,
you haven’t.
Instead, your account has been hacked,
and the hacker is now messaging all of
your connections on LinkedIn or Facebook,
looking for who they can suck in, as they
pretend to be you.
By the time you find out, it is too late.
They’ve changed your password and have
locked you out of your account.
Your connections are now receiving weird
messages from you, perhaps pushing some
product they could buy online, or asking for a
quick loan to get you out of fix. Whatever the
hacker sends, it’s damaging your reputation.
This isn’t a fictitious story. It happened to
a friend of mine who is a sales rep. Months
later, the hacker is still sending messages to
her contacts, trying to suck people in.
Two other business owners I know had
the same thing happen to them, but with the
added problem of losing access to their entire
business profiles on Facebook and Instagram,
because they were the only administrator on
the page. Both had worked hard to build
up their social media presence, which had
become a good source of leads and brand
OUR ENVIRONMENT
awareness. They lost access overnight.
This horrible situation happens more
often than you might realise, but is easily
avoidable. Here’s how to make sure this does
not happen to you:
Firstly, and most importantly, make sure
that you have Two Factor Authentication
(2FA) turned on for your social media
accounts. You’ll use an authentication app,
such as Microsoft Authenticator, which
provides a six-digit code that changes every
30 seconds. You’ll then need both a password
and the six-digit authentication code to login
to your account, which stops hackers from
getting into your account, even if they know
the password.
If you don’t have this setup, when your
account gets hacked, the hacker will setup
2FA using their own device. This stops you
from being able to get back into the account,
and you’ve then probably lost your account
forever.
Secondly, for any social media business
profile pages you have, make sure you
have more than one person assigned as an
administrator. That way, if your account was
to get hacked, you’ll have someone else who
still has administrator access to the business
profile. For Facebook, the best way to do this
is to setup Facebook Business Manager, and
assign your staff access from there.
With these simple steps, you can save
yourself from a world of pain.
• Josh Moore Marketing Director at
Duoplus
Let’s talk
about it By PHIL MACKAY
This column doesn’t relate to my ‘built
environment’ remit, at least not directly.
Rather I would like to share an idea.
I’ve attended several conferences and
events lately and observed common
themes. On the one hand there is a sense
of concern around government debt and
levels of spending. On the other, we have
an infrastructure deficit in the hundreds of
billions of dollars, the result of decades of
underinvestment.
The main conclusion drawn by speakers
has been that in order to address the
infrastructure deficit without spending
excessively, we need to achieve better
value-for-money (and also that it doesn’t
all need to be funded by taxpayer money,
but that’s a whole other article).
The consensus seems to be that one way
of achieving this is by having a more stable,
predictable pipeline of infrastructure
projects, and to avoid wasteful changes of
direction.
A recent example is the scrapping of
the project to replace Cook Strait ferries,
having already spent $424M. Without
arguing whether it was a good decision, this
shows the inefficiency of political decisionmaking
around infrastructure.
Unfortunately, our politics are becoming
more divided, and political discourse less
productive. Social media is exacerbating
existing divisions, and eroding our
collective ability to make societal progress.
As a society, we need to address this
challenge, or things will get worse rather
than better. Arguing our own points of
view online is unlikely to help us move
forward. It’s reasonably well documented
that humans are good at ignoring
information that contradicts our own
point of view. Rather, if we recognise that
we need to broaden our perspectives in
order to achieve more productive political
discourse, a good way to do this is to have
a personal conversation with someone who
has a different opinion to our own.
In 2017, Jochen Wegner and the team
from Zeit Online, an online German
newspaper, realised this and began a
project to see what would happen if they set
up some conversations between strangers
with differing views on key issues. When
1000 people signed up in the first day for
what was then called “Deutschland spricht”
or “Germany Talks” they knew they were on
to something.
Following several iterations of Germany
Talks, “Europe Talks” was launched,
bringing 17,000 people from 33 countries
together in the spring of 2019 to have
conversations with strangers and broaden
their perspectives.
More recently The Guardian has been
running a regular column called “Dining
across the divide” where they send two
people who have opposing political views
out for dinner. The aim is to find out
whether meeting in person over a meal can
bridge divides.
If New Zealand is to meaningfully
address some of our long-term challenges –
infrastructure, health, and housing to name
a few – we cannot afford to waste time and
money changing plans and direction, we
need to find a way to build consensus.
Maybe we need our own version of
“Aotearoa Talks” or “New Zealand Talks”,
the name itself might be a point of some
discussion.
• Phil Mackay is Business Development
Manager for Paua Architects