Don Brash, leader of the Opposition and leader of the National Party of New Zealand, made the following key points today in a speech to the annual conference of the New Zealand Association for Migration and Investment:

Immigration is possibly the hottest topic of politics in the United Kingdom, France, Australia, the United States and many other countries. In Britain today, many question whether multiculturalism has failed as an ideal.

• Many now feel that we should be putting more emphasis on what we have in common rather than over-emphasising our cultural and ethnic differences.
• In New Zealand, by contrast with the experience in Europe, we haven’t yet had to deal with large unintegrated and at times hostile populations in our midst.
• We are an immigrant people, and owe much of what we are to very recent immigrants, or the descendants of immigrants from a wide range of countries.

Most understand that, at a minimum, we need migrants to offset the large and growing outflow of Kiwis. When you lose to foreign shores the equivalent of nearly twice the population of Wanganui each year, you’re obliged to actively seek out replacements.

So long as we have a continued large outflow of Kiwis, our immigrant flows are going to need to be high, and over time that has the potential to substantially change the cultural make-up of our society.

• The National Party supports an ongoing immigration programme. We need immigrants to replace the New Zealanders we lose.
• A moderate growth in our population is desirable: there seems little doubt that business investment is less risky with a gradually increasing total population.

But while we celebrate that diversity, it’s equally important that as New Zealanders we share bedrock values that are crucial to New Zealand society. These are an acceptance of democracy and the rule of law, religious and personal freedom, and legal equality of the sexes. If you don’t accept these fundamentals, then New Zealand isn’t the place for you.

• The reality is that many migrants to New Zealand in recent times, and indeed to the West more generally, have come from cultures that don’t share the bedrock values that New Zealanders take for granted. In this situation, the sensible response is one of caution.
• Diversity is a bit like red wine: a certain amount is good for one’s health; too much too quickly alters your personality and can be thoroughly bad.
• Most New Zealanders like New Zealand the way it is. They value the social cohesion we have built up over many decades.

The most striking aspect of immigration in New Zealand is its scale. This country welcomed nearly 54,000 immigrants last year (excluding Australians). That number represented around 13 migrants for every thousand current residents.

Compare that with Australia: 133,000 migrants (excluding New Zealanders), which is around 7 for every thousand residents; or the United Kingdom with 140,000 migrants from non-EU countries, less than 3 migrants for every thousand residents.

The broader question of New Zealand’s attractiveness as a place in which to live and raise a family is so crucial to the immigration debate. A new National Government’s top priority will be to improve the attractiveness of New Zealand to hard-working New Zealanders and potential migrants by such policies as letting people keep more of their own money and asserting equality before the law, regardless of race.

We’d expect them to have either a good command of English or a determination to learn the language within a reasonable period, and to be young enough to contribute some taxes before going on the pension - or wealthy enough so that they can cover their own healthcare needs and income in retirement.

We need to be sensible about the English language requirement. As your chairman noted earlier this week, we have experienced a disastrous collapse in the investor migrant category in the past few years, from over 1,000 a year in 2001 and 2002, to only 39 in the first six months of this year. In this category, if somebody can’t speak English they can hire themselves a translator if they wish - that would be one job created for starters!

Our policy at the last election for business immigrants was to focus on their capacity for job creation, not expensive business plans or enforced investment in government schemes for a lengthy period.

We also need a more disciplined approach to the administration of immigration policy around limiting access to welfare and healthcare for an extended period, and swift repatriation in case of serious criminal conviction.

The overwhelming majority of employed immigrants are regarded favourably by their employers - according to a Labour Department survey released in February, 81% of the 804 employers surveyed rated the job performance of their migrant employees as good or very good, with only 4% rating them poor or very poor; and 56% of employers felt that they had benefited more from hiring a migrant than they would have done if they had hired a New Zealand resident.

Far too many people who should be enthusiastically welcomed to New Zealand have huge difficulty getting in, while some who seem to have little to offer are allowed in and allowed to stay.

• You can’t be a New Zealander and seek to undermine New Zealand.
• You can’t be a New Zealander and claim that some other law takes precedence over the law of the New Zealand Parliament.
• You can’t be a New Zealander and write to foreign newspapers urging a boycott of New Zealand exports, as one would-be citizen did recently in reaction to the publication by two newspapers of some cartoons satirizing Mohammed.

The National Party favours an immigration programme designed to benefit all of us - those born in New Zealand and those born abroad.

Our vision is of New Zealand as one nation, with many peoples to be sure, but with shared fundamental values.