Yuck. This whole thing is a massive failure, and will always be a massive failure. New Zealand does not need to 'court tech talent'. New Zealand has a net exodus of trained IT professionals, and the reason for that is low wages. That's the simple reality.
So what do companies that are starved for people do? They don't raise their wages, as the market would dictate. They make plenty of money, they COULD raise them. No, instead they just lobby the Government to put software engineering on the rubbish that is the 'skills shortage list', the biggest scam around. Then the Government makes it almost trivial for people to immigrate here if they can claim to be a software engineer, and suddenly there's no problem: plenty of supply.
The net result is New Zealanders go and work in the U.K. or the U.S., and are then replaced with Indians who come to work here in New Zealand. That's a stupid way of doing things. The skills shortage lists should be abolished and those companies should actually raise their wages if they want to keep graduates and experienced developers in NZ, and attract actual talent (as opposed to poorly paid immigrant workers and people coming in on student visas, getting internships and then getting jobs here).
I know that this is HN and I'll almost certainly get banned for saying this, but it's quite right that Peter Thiel's bullshit citizenship has created an uproar in New Zealand. He's someone that has made money, like every other billionaire in existence, through exploiting other people, and then has turned around and used that money to fund meaningless crap startups and is now buying his way into small countries.
New Zealand legalised gay marriage well before the US did. We are a very liberal country, both economically and socially - not in the sense that Americans think that word has, but in the actual literal meaning of the word 'liberal' - and we don't appreciate the Government expediting the citizenship application of the sort of person that would donate to Donald Trump.
Anyway, the only thing Rod Drury wants is more workers, more labour, less wages, less costs. He's a businessman.