Heather du Plessis-Allan: The NSW Government is coming for our Kiwi cops

We've got to talk about the brain drain that’s going on.

Today, the NSW Government has announced it is going to come for our Kiwi cops. It's got a shortage of 1500 police, and they're extremely worried about it.

So the Chris Minns Government has announced it’s going to slash red tape, cut down the course time required by more than half and fast-track Kiwi cops into their force.

And Kiwi cops will leave. Because unless they win the pay arbitration they’re about to go into, they will take a pay offer from our Government that we can see is pretty poor. So they'll all head overseas for better pay.

These are people we can’t afford to lose. Because we need police too, we're short on police as well.

And we are losing a lot of these kinds of people. The immigration figures out yesterday were pretty rough. In just a year, we’ve lost a net 52,500 Kiwis - mostly to Australia.

What we're talking about here is that these are our best and brightest. They are our skilled workers choosing to leave the country.

Now, part of the problem is where we are economically. It happens to us when we're in the bomb part of the cycle, Kiwis leave when the economy is cruddy. 

And some of it is because of the vibe in New Zealand. It's gloomy, let’s be honest, because we are having pretty angry conservations as a country about politics.

And on both those scores, I do have confidence we are now headed in the right direction. I just think it will take time to see the end result.

We also have an added complication now, which is that it’s going to get harder to get Kiwis back from Australia, because they can get citizenship again over there.

What I think we need to do is - we need to lift our game. We have to give our people a reason not to leave, and a reason to come back if they do.

And that means we have to go hard economically. That is the only way we're going to get out of this.

So we’ve got to stop being sissies about this. We need to cut this wellbeing nonsense - what does that even mean? Stop angsting about the tiniest impact some business is going to have on the environment and get real about our climate impact, it's tiny.

Dig the good stuff out of the ground, that's how you get rich. And this country needs to get wealthy, so we can all earn more - because that is what gives you a good lifestyle.

And a good lifestyle is the reason you stay here.

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