Can immigration alone fix the nursing crisis?

As nurses protest over staff shortages, questions are being raised about the government’s ability to attract new overseas recruits.

Mōrena and welcome to The Bulletin for Monday, April 17, by Catherine McGregor. Presented in partnership with Z Energy.

In today’s edition: Wayne Brown admits he dropped the ball on flood response; a National candidate is under fire for an offensive joke; and NZ’s trade deficit is forecast to be largest of all advanced economies. But first, the government says it’s turning the tide on nursing shortages. Nurses aren’t so sure.

Nurses on strike on July 12, 2018 in Auckland. (Photo: Hannah Peters/Getty Images)

Nurses make national plea for more staff 

Sometimes it takes being confronted with specifics to really grasp the size and scale of a crisis like the ongoing one in nursing. So here’s a few data points from recent weeks. In Christchurch, the city hospital was short more than 100 nurses during a single day in late February. In Whangārei, it’s been revealed that during flu season last year the nursing shortage was so acute that hospital bosses appealed to the army for help. And a new Weekend Herald investigation found that hospital employees filed more than 23,000 formal reports of unsafe staffing levels in the past three years. One service in Porirua for people with severe intellectual disabilities recorded more than 1,000 incidents in a single year. For nurses who protested around the country on Saturday, numbers like those are just the tip of the iceberg. “Decades of poor planning, inadequate funding and outright neglect across successive governments have led us to a time of absolute crisis in terms of pay, staffing resources and morale across the nursing sector,” said Paul Goulter of the NZ Nurses Organisation (NZNO), the union behind the protests. 

Is the ‘Green List’ making a dent in shortages?

While nurses have a number of demands, including better working conditions and higher pay, shortages loom over every aspect of the crisis in nursing, and in the healthcare sector as a whole. The NZNO says there’s a current need for between 4000 and 5000 more nurses, but thousands more workers are urgently required throughout the health system. Last week the government addressed that gap with the announcement of another 32 healthcare roles on the straight-to-residence “Green List” immigration pathway. Registered nurses were added to the list back in December, but it’s so far failed to lure many of them to New Zealand. Of the 162 nurses who had received resident visas by the end of February, only 19 of them applied from overseas – the rest were already working here under different visas. The tide may be turning, however. Last week health minister Ayesha Verrall said that in March alone almost 900 overseas nurses applied to register to work in New Zealand.

Bigger pay packets continue to lure nurses across the Tasman 

One of the main challenges for recruiters is our larger, richer neighbour next door. Australia is suffering from a nursing shortage of its own, but higher wages mean it’s winning the staffing battle – not just among overseas immigrants, but also NZ-born nurses who’ve grown tired of waiting for our own system to improve. Nearly 5000 New Zealand nurses registered to work in Australia in the eight months to April 1, many of them drawn by short-term contracts in the outback that can pay two to three times what they earn in NZ. A Melbourne recruiter told RNZ short-term contracts on offer there “ranged from about $3500 to about $8000 Australian dollars a week, depending on factors including seniority, expertise and the length of the contract”. But outside of rural areas the pay gap is less stark. Since the pay equity boost, base rates for more experienced nurses are equal or higher than in some states of Australia, according to a NZ nursing recruiter.

The migrant tap gets turned back on 

Elsewhere in the immigration system, numbers are on the rise. New Stats NZ data shows migration is now around pre-Covid levels, with a net gain of 52,000 migrants in the year ending February 2023. While inward migration has unsurprisingly skyrocketed since the opening of our borders in August, there’s also been a big jump in New Zealand citizens heading overseas. There was a net loss of 17,300 citizens in the year to March 1 – more than three times the average loss between 2015 and 2019.

How Technology is Changing the Way We Exercise

In the first of a two-part series with the Toi Mai Development Council, fitness practitioners in Aotearoa share their insights on how virtual coaching has transformed the fitness industry, from personalised workout plans to online communities and virtual dance classes. While there have been challenges in transitioning to the online space, trainers and instructors have found new and exciting ways to engage with clients and continue to inspire and motivate their communities. Read more here. (sponsored)

Wayne Brown on flood response: ‘I should have known better’

Auckland mayor Wayne Brown admits he took his eye off the ball but the council should bear the brunt of the blame for comms failures during the January floods. "I think the council's response was very poor. I was guilty, most of all, of assuming that they knew what they were doing," Brown told Q&A’s Jack Tame, in his first extended TV interview since taking office last year. "We all could have done better. I apologised for dropping the ball. I didn't realise a ball hadn't been thrown to me.” He also said he was open to revising upwards his proposed rates increase of 4.66% – below the rate of inflation – to help cover the council’s $295 million shortfall. However he said he didn’t think higher rates were fair on homeowners being buffeted by both rising mortgage rates and dropping house prices.  

Does an offensive joke reveal wider problems with National candidate selection?

National's candidate for the Otago electorate of Taieri is under fire after sharing an offensive joke comparing Covid-19 to young women. In an excoriating column for the Sunday Star-Times, Andrea Vance notes that Stephen Jack’s Facebook post was just the latest in a string of sexist, homophobic and otherwise lamentable comments from within National’s ranks. “The random idiot generator that selects National Party candidates has spat out another couple of beauties,” she writes of Jack and Maungakiekie candidate Greg Fleming, who compared civil unions to polygamy and incest in 2004. The latest incident shines a spotlight on the lack of diversity in National’s selection process, Vance writes, observing that “many of the winnable or blue-ribbon seats have fallen again to white men. As with the John Key years, the list must do the heavy lifting if National wants its benches to look other than vanilla.”

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NZ’s trade deficit forecast to be worst of all advanced economies

New Zealand’s current account deficit will this year be the biggest of the world’s 40 most advanced economies on a proportionate basis, the IMF is predicting. “At 8.6% of gross domestic product (GDP), the IMF believed the deficit would be even greater than that of Greece, at 8%, and Cyprus, at 7.8%,” the Herald reports. Weaker commodity prices and tourism and export education’s slow rebound post-Covid are among the factors affecting GDP, while imports are expected to rise due to reconstruction following Cyclone Gabrielle. “The current account is screaming, ‘Cool your jets’. We cannot carry on the way we have been,” says ANZ economist Sharon Zollner.

Click and collect

• Scott Sheeran, a lawyer currently based in Abu Dhabi, has been selected as the National candidate for Wellington Central, which has been held by Labour’s Grant Robertson since 2008. Labour’s candidate this year will be current MP Ibrahim Omer.

• New Zealand is currently experiencing its fourth wave of Covid-19 infections, says epidemiologist Michael Baker. 

• An election returns complaint involving Hutt City councillor Tony Stallinger and his United Hutt ticket has been referred to police.

• Separatist gunmen have attacked Indonesian army troops deployed to rescue a New Zealand pilot taken hostage in Papua, leaving at least six dead.

• Gisborne's main water supply pipe was identified as at unacceptable risk of catastrophic failure months before Cyclone Gabrielle wrecked it, RNZ reports.

Got some feedback about The Bulletin, or anything in the news? Get in touch with me at thebulletin@thespinoff.co.nz.

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‘They threw every possible test at this finding to try to make it go away. And there was nothing they could do to make it go away.’

The strangest health story of the week has to be this: regularly eating ice cream appears to have significant health benefits for some groups, including significantly lowering the risk of diabetes for men considered medically overweight. I know, it sounds impossible, but as The Atlantic’s David Merritt Johns reports, it does look like ice cream has some kind of mysterious health benefit – more specifically, that it “might be the strongest diabetes prophylactic in the dairy aisle”. Of course, it’s a little more complicated than that, but still: there’s something going on with ice cream and blood sugar – and the exact opposite of what you would expect. Fascinating stuff.