This brings to mind a point that I brought up in this thread earlier that nobody responded to:
This is a broader question than what I usually pose in threads like this, but Ebowed's comment got me thinking. My impression is that economic opportunities for young people in New Zealand are rather limited, and I know that there is far more migration from New Zealand to Australia than the reverse. I'm sure that the right to live and work in Australia is very important to New Zealanders, but I'm curious whether youth emigration is a major political issue in New Zealand, and if so who has plans to address it and how. One would think that this might be fertile territory for a party like ACT, but on the other hand the policies with which ACT is associated don't seem to have done much to solve this problem in the '80s and '90s.
The present housing crisis is obviously clearly related. Government policy favors rent-seeking homeowners looking for continued appreciation in the housing market. Those gains for homeowners are naturally coming at the expense of non-homeowners (in other words, young people), who will continue to respond in the same way that young New Zealanders have for decades: by emigrating abroad, where wages are better and housing is cheaper. It's unclear to me how New Zealand will solve its shortage of skilled labor by bringing in skilled workers from abroad when those workers could go somewhere better instead.
