The tabs:
- There's a desperate shortage of housing in Queenstown, so Commissioners insist that a development plan reduce some 13-storey towers by five storeys. The buildings would have had apartments, hotel rooms, and commercial space. Even hotel rooms take pressure off housing given the number of houses serving as Airbnbs.
- There's a desperate shortage of nurses, so the process that the Nursing Council runs for recognising foreign nurses' qualifications takes so long to sort anything out that nurses who started their applications in March have now given up.
- There's a desperate shortage of GPs. Salaries for GPs in Australia are much higher than in New Zealand. The government closed the border to the normal flow of foreign medical staff for a couple of years but wasn't able to keep NZ-trained staff from leaving for Oz. It hasn't done anything to make it easier, now that the borders are open, for GPs from comparable systems to show up and hang up a shingle. When asked why training hundreds of GPs led to a net increase of only 15 GPs, the Minister of Health said "I haven't interrogated that figure."
- The government believes there to be too few competitors in grocery, so rather than open up the Overseas Investment Act and zoning/consenting so that it's easier for foreign entrants to come in, it's proposing legislation that would, among other things, let them force any new international entrant to open up its wholesale side to rent-seeking Kiwi competitors after a five-year grace period. If that doesn't encourage international chains to jump through OIA hoops, nothing will.
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