Oh, the irony
I'm all for the statue of ACM Park; it's long overdue in my opinion, but there is a certain irony in the issue of a statue for a famous New Zealander at a time when the UK Government is about to remove ancestral rights of New Zealanders to access visas. They're lumping New Zealand, [and Australia] in with all the free-loaders and bludgers of the EU.
Recently, the Government published a Green Paper on immigration and citizenship that raised the question of whether the ancestry visa should be abolished. This is a consultation document and is not final policy; but since it is the second time in four years that the Home Office has suggested scrapping the ancestry visa, someone in Whitehall clearly considers it to be expendable.
The Green Paper states: "Given that the proposed immigration system provides explicit routes to the UK for those coming as economic migrants, family members or refugees, we need to decide whether a Commonwealth national’s ancestral connections to the UK are sufficient to allow them to come here to work without the need to satisfy a resident labour market test. We are therefore asking this question as part of the consultation contained within this paper."