PM Declares Migration 'Turned a Corner', Corner Located 28,500 People Down

Christopher Luxon says the overall migration picture for New Zealand citizens has “turned a corner.” His evidence is that Kiwis returning from Australia are up 14 percent on the year, and that departures are down each month. Both of these things are true. Neither of them is the whole picture, which is presumably why only these two made it into the sentence.

In the year to December 2025, 19,000 New Zealanders returned from Australia and 47,500 left for it, a net loss of 28,500 people, while departures fell by just 1 percent year on year. Luxon’s own framing was direct enough: “Kiwis returning home from Australia is up, and Kiwis leaving each and every month is down, and that’s a positive thing for New Zealand.” Both figures moved in the right direction. They moved from a very bad place to a still quite bad place, which is technically progress and technically still a corner nobody would choose to be around.

A country can genuinely be improving and still be losing nearly thirty thousand people a year to one other country. Both facts are allowed to be true at once. Only one of them got the press conference.