This week, the Australian Bureau of Statistics released monthly net permanent and long-term arrivals data, which revealed that immigration into Australia remains turbo-charged:
The opposite is playing out across the pond in New Zealand, where immigration is easing rapidly amid a significant outflow of New Zealand residents to other nations, most notably Australia.
As illustrated by the following chart from Justin Fabo at Antipodean Macro, net migration to New Zealand has eased significantly from last year’s peak:
Departures of New Zealand citizens remain very high, although they have declined modestly from the peak:
In the year to July 2024, 55,800 net New Zealand citizens left New Zealand, up from 37,700 net departures the previous year:
There was a provisional net migration loss of 27,200 people to Australia in the year ended December 2023. This was made up of 17,300 migrant arrivals from Australia to New Zealand, and 44,500 migrant departures from New Zealand to Australia.
In the year to December 2023, 54% of New Zealand citizen migrant departures were to Australia.
A key reason why Kiwis are fleeing to Australia is because our unemployment rate of 4,2% is currently below New Zealand’s at 4.6%:
The lower unemployment rate in Australia is a departure from the period between 2014 and 2018, when Australian unemployment was on average 0.7 percentage points higher than New Zealand’s.
New Zealand is also suffering from a deeper per capita recession than Australia:
While the Australian economy is in bad shape, New Zealand’s is even worse.
Accordingly, Kiwis are pouring into Australia, offset by migrant arrivals from developing nations.
