Going Places lunch-time book launch and discussion

The McGuinness Institute hosted a lunch-time event for the Wellington launch of the new book Going Places on Thursday, 17 March 2020.

Written by Julie Fry and Hayden Glass, 2020 TalentNZ Journal contributor, the book explores the economic contribution of migration to and from New Zealand. Hayden and Julie explained their evidence and shared their conclusions that included immigrant visa options and the importance of ‘shifting the focus of risk to value’. They then opened it up to the audience for questions, which became an engaging discussion.

The audience queried the scope of their investigation and if any action points had been identified. It was acknowledged that New Zealand hasn’t had any major migration disasters, rather because we undertake small initiatives, we are able to take risks and are prepared to learn from our mistakes.

Wendy McGuinness introducing authors Julie Fry
and Hayden Glass

Building on Sir Paul Callaghan’s vision – creating ‘a place where talent wants to live’ – this book explores how we can attract skilled, creative and entrepreneurial people born in other countries, and whether our ‘seventeenth region’ – the more than 600,000 New Zealanders living abroad – can be a greater national asset. Attracting talent is one of four integrated work-streams (grow, attract, retain and connect) that form part of our TalentNZ ecosystem. Understanding how these work-streams interact is the first step to identifying strategies that will enable communities to consider, design and instigate workable strategies to do in a way that allows progress to be reviewed and measured over time.

To learn more about our TalentNZ project, please see the website.