Housing crisis, Student visa fraud & immigration growth? Banning Plastic bags?

Please try get an opportunity to watch this documentary by renowned investigative Kiwi journalist Bryan Bruce, the NZ On Air-funded documentaryWho Owns New Zealand Now sets out to answer some leading questions about the housing crisis, here is the link from Stuff news;https://www.stuff.co.nz/life-style/homed/houses/96724526/who-owns-new-zealand-now-new-doco-tackles-our-housing-crisis

Don't you think it is absurd that New Zealand allows a person who has only lived here for 12 months and has residency the option to vote. Most countries require citizenship or lawful resident after 4 years. No citizenship test about the country or English language test is needed for NZ citizenship here. No wonder Australia considers NZ the backdoor for immigrants. It is incredibly easy which it shouldn't be.

Could you please forward this to any politician that is willing to question the current government on these issues that I bring up in my email?

Here are a couple of very important links that I believe would be very useful and helpful to you and your department for now and future reference. New Zealand government needs to answer to these current important problems that affect the majority of us, unless you are the 1%.

Please read some of the articles or just read the first & last few paragraphs if you don't have enough time. https://www.nbr.co.nz/article/opinion-reduce-immigration-increase-wealth-159904

http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/91925666/this-is-what-we-know-about-how-record-migration-affects-traffic-schools-housing-and-the-economy-in-new-zealand

Could one party please step up and while we at it, please also stop going on with a populist agenda and answer to these issues; the out of control immigration, the housing crisis, the increase in poverty, one of the highest homeless rate in the OECD, the pressure on our health and education systems. Our dirty waterways, selling our farms to Chinese citizens in China who are not New Zealanders or residents here, allowing foreigners to speculate on our housing market, making it unaffordable for most New Zealanders. Are you suggesting these policies have been good for New Zealand - give a sincere answer to these issues.

This government needs to answer to these issues.Which are;
1. Record homelessness
2. Unprecedented levels of immigration
3. No wage growth in comparison to cost of living
3. In 2007 JK gave a speech about how he would fix the housing crisis (in its infancy) but now there is no crisis and it's 10x worse.
4. Increase of taxes that impact the middle/low income earners
5. Sold assets that would today be benefiting the country as a whole
6. Health, education, police funding suffering
7. Wasted money on a flag referendum
8. Claimed accommodation supplements
9. Legalised synthetic rubbish because Peter Dunnes son was a lobbyist/lawyer for the trade
10.Millions spent on rebranding/refurbishing just to show they are doing something
11.Millions on consultants (can't they do what we pay them for)
12. The list could go on as to how the middle/low income earners are suffering in this country to make ends meet. YES, I said workers!

The current government aren't delivering to NZer's they are delivering to the Far East. Corruption has been rising in NZ, and it is rising fast. Read this article; " An increase in bribery and corruption tarnishing New Zealand's ethical image may be due to an influx of migrants from countries where such practices are normal."
http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/better-business/67511312/bribery-and-corruption-a-growing-threat-in-nz-deloitte

On top of all this we have student visa backdoor in NZ as well as a substantial amount of low skilled low age visas being issued for chefs, IT desktop support workers claiming residency saying they are "IT engineers", liquor store "store managers", & so called "dairy shop managers", hospitality workers, taxi drivers etc. Many of these low skilled professions trying and succeeding in claiming residency and many fraudulently(I am happy to provide evidence articles/links to all these claims for proof). There are more than enough New Zealand residents/citizens to fill all these roles. We need highly skilled migrants not low wage low skilled migrants. This will ultimately undermine the NZ labour/workforce completely which is already underway as the wage growth has remained stagnant over the years.This gives a little more insight to the loophole and the reason why it undermines New Zealanders labour market. http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/PA1501/S00120/student-visas-sold-as-back-door-to-nz-residency.htm

To put things in perspective, I have a close acquaintance who works for the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE). He shares many discouraging stories about the state of immigration NZ with regards to the amount exploitation in the labour force and the amount of fraud happening with people applying for work visas and specifically student visas from India and a number of other developing countries.

There has also been countless times my children who are atuni have been turned down for part time work, only to find out the applicant who got the job was a foreigner on a student or work visa. Shouldn't NZ citizens or residents be in front of the line for these low wage jobs that seem to be flowing 'offshore'?

We are not getting high-skilled immigrants, as Bernard Hickey has pointed out, it’s not “doctors, filmmakers and software engineers” who are pouring in. The figures show we’re mostly importing a high number of lowly paid chefs, retail 'managers', tour guides and hospitality workers, and IT desktop support workers.The government has got itself into a mess over the interrelated issues of immigration, house prices and housing the homeless by denying for years they are a problem and then not coming up with a coherent or plausible plan to solve any of them.

Student visa scam - It's the tip of the iceberg
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/immigration/news/article.cfm?c_id=231&objectid=11762347

One of the big issues that needs to be debated is what type of economic growth we want in New Zealand.

Many of the world's challenges have been caused by the explosive growth of the human population. Just more than 200 years ago there were fewer than 1 billion people on the earth. Today there are 7.4 billion and the United Nations estimates there will be more than 11 billion by 2100.

A report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) gives New Zealand a poor environmental rating. The historical reasons for this biodiversity tragedy are unmistakable. We drained 90 per cent of our wetlands, removed over 70 per cent of our native forests and dammed, straightened, stop-banked and engineered most rivers.

Indeed, we altered everything to suit us with total abandon, and this loss of natural capital continues unabated.We need to face the fact that the economy is but a tiny subset of the environment - not vice versa. This country could easily be a high-producing clean, green example of sustainability for the rest of the world. But it will take courageous and knowledgeable leadership on ecological sustainability

From a New Zealand perspective, a low population is one of the factors that make us special and an attractive place to live and raise a family.However, New Zealand has one of the highest rates of immigration growth in the Western world and about three times that of the United States relative to the size of our population.

Just to put this into context, in New Zealand our net immigration rate is running at 70,000 a year against a population of 4.6m (1.5 per cent), whereas in the UK it is 330,000 a year against a population of 64m (0.5 per cent). Yet in the United Kingdom the immigration rate was such an issue that it was a major factor behind the Brexit vote.There is no doubt that this rapid rate is putting huge pressure on our infrastructure, particularly in Auckland, which is struggling to keep up with demands for more housing, transport, education, parks and healthcare. We have no strategy in place for dealing with this rate of growth or spreading it to where it is needed in the regions.This helps company profitability in the short term but does little to help real wages grow, which is important for our economy in the long term. We also have around 130,000 unemployed people, which seems like an incredible economic and human waste when we are importing, often low-wage, migrants to fill shortages.

One idea that has been floated, is that New Zealand should target a desired rate of population, deduct our natural growth rate and make up the shortfall with targeted immigration. That way we can plan for the necessary infrastructure and housing required rather than trying to play catch-up.

Targeted immigration can be good for an economy. It can bring in new ideas, cultures and increased entrepreneurship. As a nation we need to have a clear plan as to what rate of immigration we want and ultimately what we want our economy to look like. Do we want to be a higher-wage economy with strong clean, green credentials, much like a Switzerland of the South Pacific or do we have some other aspiration?

My last little rant will include this and you would be wise to read(or skim read it); On the subject of exponential population growth which is what is currently happening here in NZ and in many countries around the world, it ultimately produces a worsening outlook for our sustainable use of resources in virtually every way. Yet most of us have compliantly tiptoed around even some of the more obvious indicators of unplanned growth – such as declining living standards in our major cities due to the lack of corresponding infrastructure investment. Just by using a bit of logic and bit of rational thinking one can understand that is unsustainable.

In an odd alignment of interests, political correctness has provided a distraction from the neoliberal motivations responsible for our swelling numbers. Scientists, academics and environmentalists have been gagged by the real prospect of character assassination should they speak up.

While it would be silly to dispute the existence of racism in any society, the ever present ‘racist under the bed’ and monotonous tactic of trawling over language for signs of moral turpitude has promoted self-censorship. These days, a fear of receiving a savaging from the pit-bulls of political correctness for speaking out about population growth is far from irrational.

Bottom line is that New Zealand has embraced a neo-liberal economic ideology. Maybe this will sum it up "Dissent of population growth per se has all too easily been conflated with the rantings of xenophobes and bigots. By salivating over trigger words the little debate that has bubbled to the surface has invariably been quickly silenced with a politically correct knee-lift and a lecture about the primacy of economic growth and its co-dependence upon population expansion."

A failure to implement a global sustainability plan that addresses excess consumption and over-population while ensuring greater social equity may well be fatal to global civilization. Indeed, adherence to any variant of the growth-bound status quo promises a future of uncontrollable climate change, plummeting biodiversity, civil disorder, geopolitical turmoil and resource wars.

In these circumstances, should not elected politicians everywhere have an obligation to explain how their policies reflect the fact of global overshoot?

No one will listen until it is too late. Lack of sustainability and greed will be our undoing. Saying l told you so won't help then. The world for the most part, is truly run by cretins! We need a environmental renaissance awareness.

Here is a very short, but succinct trailer video from Professor Stephen Emmott, Head of Computational Science at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, UK- 10 Billion, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jV5xiRKw5f4

I will most likely not get a response from any of you, but hopefully you at least read it or check some of the links for more information. Rational thinking and a bit of logic goes a long way towards solving these problems.

On the subject of all this, it is about time New Zealand banned plastic supermarket bags. They are horrendous for the oceans, marine life and the environment. That is a fact. We need to stand up to our supposed 'clean, green'(green-washing)image and ban these bags. If Kenya, South Africa and countless other countries can ban it then NZ definitely can. It is embarrassing that we have not already done so.

ENDS

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