Mutual exploitation

The government needs to make it easier for immigrant nurses to gain residency, so they can relieve the pressure on our understaffed hospitals.

- JANE CLIFTON

The government's immigration reset increasingly better suits the name "beset". Especially since Immigration Minister Michael Wood declared the other day that the previous policies were "a bit of an exploitist charter".

To borrow a remark from former French president Nicolas Sarkozy, Wood unfortunately missed a very good opportunity to shut up.

The pickle he's now in over the critical shortage of nurses is that it's embarrassingly clear the government is insisting on exploiting immigrant nurses on its terms rather than theirs.

Every significant health lobby is pleading for incoming nurses to be given full "green-list" residency so they can, for instance, buy homes and avoid steep fees for their children's education, rather than having to wait two years before they can even apply to stay. In the currently feverish global market for health professionals, other countries offer this and more.

The instruction here from the Beehive remains that New Zealand will continue to be tough on nurses, and tough on the causes of nurses.

The government says too many incoming nurses can't be trusted to stay doing the jobs they're recruited to do. In its defence, the statistics appear to bear this out, but at such a small margin as to be barely even annoying. There's a turnover of 6% of foreign nurses, versus 4% for domestically trained nurses - hardly a haemorrhage.

Even if it were true, as the Beehive's aggrieved tone suggests, the two-year-wait policy would still be questionable in the current climate. Given one hospital has resorted to accommodating waiting overspill patients under canvas, more nurses are surely better than fewer, even if they make the revolving door spin a bit faster than we might like.

Although Wood's exploitation concerns are well founded, in the light of some sickening cases of enslavement of immigrant workers, he is guilty of remarkable naivety.