As nurses protest over staff shortages, questions are being raised about the government’s ability to attract new overseas recruits, writes Catherine McGregor in this excerpt from The Bulletin, The Spinoff’s morning news round-up. To receive The Bulletin in full each weekday, sign up here.

Nurses make national plea for more staff

Sometimes it takes being confronted with specifics to really grasp the size and scale of a crisis like the ongoing one in nursing. So here’s a few data points from recent weeks. In Christchurch, the city hospital was short more than 100 nurses during a single day in late February. In Whangārei, it’s been revealed that during flu season last year the nursing shortage was so acute that hospital bosses appealed to the army for help. And a new Weekend Herald investigation found that hospital employees filed more than 23,000 formal reports of unsafe staffing levels in the past three years. One service in Porirua for people with severe intellectual disabilities recorded more than 1,000 incidents in a single year. For nurses who protested around the country on Saturday, numbers like those are just the tip of the iceberg. “Decades of poor planning, inadequate funding and outright neglect across successive governments have led us to a time of absolute crisis in terms of pay, staffing resources and morale across the nursing sector,” said Paul Goulter of the NZ Nurses Organisation (NZNO), the union behind the protests.

Is the ‘Green List’ making a dent in shortages?

While nurses have a number of demands, including better working conditions and higher pay, shortages loom over every aspect of the crisis in nursing, and in the healthcare sector as a whole. The NZNO says there’s a current need for between 4000 and 5000 more nurses, but thousands more workers are urgently required throughout the health system. Last week the government addressed that gap with the announcement of another 32 healthcare roles on the straight-to-residence “Green List” immigration pathway. Registered nurses were added to the list back in December, but it’s so far failed to lure many of them to New Zealand. Of the 162 nurses who had received resident visas by the end of February, only 19 of them applied from overseas – the rest were already working here under different visas. The tide may be turning, however. Last week health minister Ayesha Verrall said that in March alone almost 900 overseas nurses applied to register to work in New Zealand.

Bigger pay packets continue to lure nurses across the Tasman

One of the main challenges for recruiters is our larger, richer neighbour next door. Australia is suffering from a nursing shortage of its own, but higher wages mean it’s winning the staffing battle – not just among overseas immigrants, but also NZ-born nurses who’ve grown tired of waiting for our own system to improve. Nearly 5000 New Zealand nurses registered to work in Australia in the eight months to April 1, many of them drawn by short-term contracts in the outback that can pay two to three times what they earn in NZ. A Melbourne recruiter told RNZ short-term contracts on offer there “ranged from about $3500 to about $8000 Australian dollars a week, depending on factors including seniority, expertise and the length of the contract”. But outside of rural areas the pay gap is less stark. Since the pay equity boost, base rates for more experienced nurses are equal or higher than in some states of Australia, according to a NZ nursing recruiter.

The migrant tap gets turned back on

Elsewhere in the immigration system, numbers are on the rise. New Stats NZ data shows migration is now around pre-Covid levels, with a net gain of 52,000 migrants in the year ending February 2023. While inward migration has unsurprisingly skyrocketed since the opening of our borders in August, there’s also been a big jump in New Zealand citizens heading overseas. There was a net loss of 17,300 citizens in the year to March 1 – more than three times the average loss between 2015 and 2019.

The name is gone, but how much have the government’s much-maligned water reforms really changed, asks Catherine McGregor in this excerpt from The Bulletin, The Spinoff’s morning news round-up. To receive The Bulletin in full each weekday, sign up here.

So farewell then, Three Waters

By the time prime minister Chris Hipkins stepped up to the mic yesterday morning, word was already out. As revealed earlier this week by BusinessDesk and others, Three Waters has gone to the big policy bonfire in the sky. In its place is Affordable Water Reform – a rebranded Three Waters, minus the now-politically toxic name and with a few major tweaks including an increase in the number of water management “entities” involved. The original plan for just four to cover the entire country had attracted widespread criticism from the start. Now there will be 10 entities, largely drawn over regional council boundaries, giving local communities more control over their own water – but also increasing the overall cost to the ratepayer. Still, the government says the reforms will bring substantial savings compared to doing nothing at all: between $2800 and $5400 on average per household, per year by 2054.

Mayors split on new plan

The government is also de-emphasising “co-governance” as part of its rebrand, in the hopes of ameliorating public opposition to the reforms. But councils are the main target audience for the announcement, writes Stuff’s Thomas Manch. Some of them still aren’t convinced. Mayor Nigel Bowen tells the Timaru Herald the changes are once again “a case of Wellington thinking it knows what’s best for South Canterbury” while Mackenzie District mayor Anne Munro says the real issues are “assets being expropriated without compensation, and no real property rights over these assets”. Those voicing support include Local Government New Zealand and Ngāi Tahu which says while it preferred the previous plan, the new one is still “a significant improvement on the pre-reform status quo”. Another group no doubt cheering the change: all the long-suffering journalists (like yours truly) who can finally stop caring whether Three Waters should be capitalised or not.

Meanwhile, the water crisis continues 

They might differ on policy specifics, but nearly everyone agrees that water reform is desperately needed. The crisis was highlighted this week by the release of Our Freshwater 2023, a damning report on the state of our waterways from the environment ministry and Stats NZ. It found that 46% of all our lakes larger than 1 hectare are in poor or very poor health, while 45% of rivers are unswimmable. According to Greenpeace, the government’s water reforms are missing a crucial step by failing to regulate the dairying and fertiliser industries – “the industries that are polluting drinking water in the first place”. But farmers say they’re doing their best. “We all want the same thing,” Federated Farmers’ Colin Hurst tells Stuff. “Farmers are part of the community as well, and we want good, clean water quality as well. It’s not going to happen overnight.” It’s an uphill battle given the explosion in dairying over recent decades. In Canterbury, for example, the dairy cattle herd increased by a staggering 973% between 1990 and 2019, from 113,000 to 1.2 million animals.

Water – and the lack of it – an international concern

New Zealand is far from the only country confronting hard choices on water usage. While aging infrastructure, safe drinking water, and better wastewater and stormwater services are the urgent needs driving reform here, in the western US it’s the water supply itself that’s at risk. With the Colorado River Basin experiencing a 23-year drought, its worst in 1,200 years, the states that rely on the river are being threatened with massive government-mandated cuts to their water supply. It’s hard to overstate the impact on cities like Las Vegas, which gets 90% of its water from the river and whose residents are now facing huge and permanent changes to their way of life.