 Hello, we're here on economy days at New Frontiers 2016. I'm Elina from Kiwi Connect and I'm here with Hayden Glass, who is a consulting economist and author of a new book, Going Places, co-authored with Julie Frye. Hayden, do you want to tell us a little bit about the book? Sure, yeah, it's about how New Zealand can change its immigration and immigration policies to try and encourage more people who were born overseas, more smart creative people that come here, and also how we can make more of the fact that we've got an enormous overseas population, how we can make that a greater national asset. And along the way, it tells the story of the last 25 years or so of New Zealand's migration flows of people coming in and people leaving the country and paints a picture of kind of where we sit at the moment. Right, so I mean, why would you say in a nutshell that New Zealand needs to attract more creative people from overseas? Well, so what we have at the moment is a system where it's really good at collecting people who want to work. So New Zealand is a world leader 93% of our immigrants are employed six months after arrival, which is amongst the highest in the world. But what we are suggesting is not, is adding to that people who aren't coming here to work for somebody else, adding some experimentation around how you could encourage those types of people who might come here and do something different and do something new to actually have an opportunity to be able to do that without, without, you know, having to jump through a whole lot of hoops up front. Right, you also mentioned the extensive expat community that we have. So many Kiwis living overseas. What, what value do you think they can bring whilst living overseas to New Zealand? Yeah, so part of this is about kind of what kind of country does New Zealand want to be and we see it as you want to be connected to the world. And so having people from other countries here and having New Zealanders in other countries is how we maintain connections with other places. So what it would be good is if we could diversify the places that New Zealanders can go. Because at the moment we're tightly connected to Australia. There's a largest New Zealand population in Australia, but we're already well connected with Australians right beside us. So it would be good if we could get New Zealanders to have the opportunity to go further afield and to stay connected with New Zealand and to, and to build those bridges with our countries. Right. Do you have any comments around the economic benefits that, that can be bought from people's extended networks beyond New Zealand? Yeah, well, the evidence, this is one of the things that we cover in some detail in the book. And the evidence is basically that migration overall is a small positive impact. So the political angle on it is really powerful. There's a huge amount of debate and it outweighs actually what the, what the economics shows, which is actually the long run. Migration gives you a, gives you a small positive impact, but also diversity is really valuable. In fact, a lot of the conversations here today have been about, OK, diverse teams work better. And so trying to sprinkle together, trying to bring together that kind of chemistry that happens. When, when people who aren't like each other kind of come together, that's, that's part of the magic of what we're kind of trying to achieve. And, and it's hard to do that as a sort of national political level, like in the sense of immigration policy, that stuff really happens at an individual connection level. So we're trying to, we're trying to make that stuff possible and make it possible for people to work together more easily through opening up immigration just a little bit in this particular way. Sounds like some really useful stuff. So when, when does the book come out? March 14th will be in the bookstores. 15 bucks. Do the world a favour and buy a paper copy. A paper copy of Going Places by Hayden Glass and Julie Fry. Thanks so much, Hayden.