Far Right Think Tank says immigration in NZ is ok

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A NZ Far Right Think Tank says immigration is ok.

Well of course they would.

The property bubble is reliant on immigration and the rich volk at the NZ Institute love that.

Migrants are keeping wages down and rents up and the rich volk at the NZ Institute love that.

Migrant workers are easier to exploit and the rich volk at the NZ Institute love that.

The NZ Institute, a far right think tank, is desperately trying to keep neoliberal globalisation as NZs default settings. After 30 years of the neoliberal experiment in NZ, the NZ Institute needs to keep the myths and lies alive that the free market is the only market.

By claiming we need to constantly import labour, the NZ Institute lets their business mates off the hook for training and for paying better wages.

TDB Recommends NewzEngine.com

The NZ Institute justifies mass migration by claiming migrants are doing the jobs NZers don’t want to do. That’s bullshit, those industries who are paying pathetic money for the jobs that need doing are the problem, instead of imports cheaper workers, those industries should be forced to pay more!

The NZ Institute also ignores the damage to many non-unionised migrant workers themselves who find they are exploited and vulnerable to vicious bosses once they arrive here,

The Spin Blog has even been infected by the NZ Institute with a researcher claiming that  Peter Thiel was a lovely billionaire that we needed to suck up to. Interesting to note The Spin Blog didn’t even mention that Thiel  owns the 5 Eyes mass surveillance monster that is Palantir.

Trump won and Brexit happened because Governments have been conned by far right think tanks like the NZ Institute who keep telling them open ended immigration is great. What it actually does is lower wages, destroy’s infrastructure, pushes up rents, allow for migrant work abuses and alienates vast groups of  domestic workers who are now competing with workers prepared to work for less than they are.

National have to keep the immigration floodgates open to keep their property bubble growing and then NZ Institute needs to con NZers that this is all working wonderfully.

12 COMMENTS

    • Are you calling Martyn a Fascist, and are you planning to punch him in the face for questioning immigration?

      Before you cough and splutter in protest, the implication in my question is deliberately intended to be as dumb and facile as the implication you have drawn in yours.

  1. Nothing new, the same old story, the same old story we’ve endured for decades: sabotage of the future of ALL young people so a few greedy sociopaths can have more digits in their bank accounts and can live the high life for a few more years.

  2. That’s exactly right and future generations who do not have rich mummys and daddys to buy , or contribute substantially to buying a house for them, are in for a very rough exhausting ride.
    Any fool knows that Kiwis do not earn anywhere near enough to drive up house prices up to their current astronomical levels ….nobody , but nobody that I have spoken to believes that garbage and when people read that kind of nonsense it makes them extremely angry.
    We now have a class of younger people who, due to ridiculous levels of privilege don’t have a clue what the true value of the dollar is and another class who know only too well the futility of their situation.
    As Aussie rock Gods ‘ Midnight Oil ‘ once sang …”the rich get richer and the poor get the picture”….

  3. I say this again, telling people that we need population growth by way of immigration is not all that much different from telling Kiwi mums to have more babies (more than are needed to replace the parents). It is only cheaper, as many immigrants get trained overseas.

    Let us see how they calculated their “benefit” claim. I bet they ignored certain medium to long term cost factors, such as additional health-care, education, social and infrastructure spending that becomes necessary when the population grows.

    And Andrew Little is right to ask, how this can be, when the per capita productivity or “growth” is hardly noticeable, meaning we are not performing any better overall.

    More people need more housing, roads, train networks, powerlines, sewerage systems, water, health spending, and so forth.

    As resources are finite, this can never end in a better outcome, because one day there will be less water per head of population, less land to live on, less agricultural production per person, to feed them. Only in a fossil fuel powered economy can this growth be met with resources, but these fuels are also going to run out one day.

    It is like a Ponzi Scheme, this stuff the NZI preaches to us, growth to them seems to be unlimited, the more people, the bigger the market, the more workers, the more consumers, bla, bla, bla.

    We have heard it all before. More people though will need more of so much, and to supply that, they tell us we need even more people later on, until we have a population the size of the UK or so.

    Where is that left think tank with their research, I wonder, that one Sue Bradford is working for? We always get heaps of neoliberal think tanks telling us what serves their clientele, the one percent, we need alternative reports on this.

  4. Unfortunately spot on.

    I’m always amazed when right and liberal commentators and MSM say that inward migration does not drive up house prices and rental properties. Where do they think the approx 200,000+ people coming in with migrant or temporary residency are going to live?? The Tardis???

    I’m all for sustainable immigration – the way it is supposed to work but National are clearly using it to prop up their unimaginative and poor stewardship of the economy. National are using the ‘lazy’ way to just sell land and houses and dodgy degrees like cookery, keep the construction workforce cheaper (while pushing the construction costs of materials up for inferior and dodgy products) to keep NZ economy looking ok on paper.

    In reality it is pushing the boundaries socially by creating an underclass of people who are homeless or in precarious accommodation, increasing day to day living and stress for everybody else living in NZ, decreasing the likelihood of a job and forcing people into debt with dodgy courses to ‘retrain’ to go off WINZ and into a student loan situation or pay back $1000 a week hotels, underwritten by the tax payer.

    House insurance has increased, mortgages are on the increase and apparently the cost of building is set to increase 20% next year. The new properties being built even with cheaper migrant labour, the unitary plan, SHA and so forth are not coming down – in fact they are going up. The neoliberal answer will always be charge more and deregulate!!

    The more we pay someone the better everything gets apparently. That is why migration is essential to them, they need more money coming in from else where and to borrow more money to keep the ponzi scheme going – otherwise the entire country will grind to a halt.

    NZ does not and can not afford the infrastructure like other countries that have 100 year old tube and train systems for a start. The UK are already dismantling the Private partnerships that caused havoc in London when they ‘sold; the train lines to different businesses, so PPP’s are proven failures.

    You have to feel sorry for the people of the UK when their government has pushed through an expensive nuclear power plant built by Chinese while at the same time seemingly worried about China’s increased prosperity and military expertise and wanting more corporate welfare for defence and spying. Not logical at all. But that’s neoliberalism. You just need to cover the short term profit and push the potential problems under the table and onto someone else.

    NZ thinks that by digging up the roads causing massive congestion on that alone even before the additional vehicles and putting in a tiny city link, putting thousands of planned houses into our cities and our wastewater systems everything will be tickety boo.

    It’s clearly not going to end well for those existing ratepayers having to subsidise it, nor for the increased rental prices for the increased insurance, travel costs and rates from it. I’ve notice they have switched to driving the inward migration to other cities – clearly the answer is exporting Auckland’s problems to the rest of the country!

    The poor management and culture of AT and associated COO’s seem to have one solution – get more money out of rate payers and increase costs so they can go along at glacial speed with little oversight and targets so small and far away they are meaningless. No one seem to have cottoned on to this, in fact many liberals have been trained like Pavlovs dogs to salivate at the prospect of a plan of transport or a report on transport or housing, not the actual physical and working transport or housing itself at an affordable and fair cost to the users.

    I don’t see any easy fixes to this problem. The trick of the neoliberals is to design a system so interwoven that it is near impossible to escape with hefty penalties for doing so, and to pit more liberal people against each other (such as on the immigration, housing and transport issues) while they keep on with their core business, asset stripping countries and resources and charging those who use it, more (even when it is a public system).

    We then get loads of think tank reports that suggest that all is well, just charge more to somebody, make future generations pay to fix the obvious problems, neoliberalism is working as planned, move on move on.

  5. The other thing to consider is that one of the biggest advantages of immigration is to import in new ideas, educated and creative people to drive diversity and change in countries.

    In NZ the government seems against those migrants instead favouring low paid workers with manual or soft skills like dairy workers and restaurant managers, middle class migrants that have made money from globalism and neoliberalism and want to study or buy here and super rich right wingers like Peter Thiel.

    So as well as physical problems from this migration experiment like housing and increasing the social costs, we are also importing in a massive cultural change of people who are often foot soldiers of neoliberalism who question little, have benefited from it and want to keep voting for it.

    The smarter migrants don’t seem to last long here. Normally just working until getting their permanent residency and then leaving the country themselves (but still having the option to come back).

    No wonder we are so popular to migrate to! It’s a lot of paperwork, you need to persuade someone to give you a job, but few real barriers – win win to settle here!

    • In short where are all the migrant Chinese, Indian and UK, writers, artists and thinkers that could be migrating here – because it is new ideas NZ badly needs – and new economy businesses – like Green Tech – a true meeting of minds -to grow our economy and strengthen our ties to other countries.

      Instead from National they think we need 200,000 per year short term labour fixes and food businesses or IT companies that fill their companies with cheap IT workers and then the companies bugger off to cheaper places like Nigeria leaving the workers unemployed stranded in NZ.

      Surprise, surprise, in 30 years the neoliberal immigration approach has not worked.

      Please, please can we try something different!

      I’m actually positive on immigration, I just don’t like how it is being used in NZ and other countries for neoliberal advancement and the breaking down of Western society and independent thought, which then leads to Hitler, Slobodan Milošević and are we heading there with Trump?

  6. Anything from the NZ Institute has to be taken with a ton of salt.

    They’re just a shell front for their wealthy far right donors who in this case are direct beneficiaries of immigration pushing down wages.

    Their intellectual dishonesty is obvious when confronted with reality. I emailed them about their ‘report’ that teachers should be on performance pay, and pointed out that the Harvard Business Review (hardly a bastion of liberal socialist thought) review of PBP research shows that it doesn’t work, so they refused to engage further.

    Typical right wingers – never let reality get in the way of their ideology.

  7. Its not like a ban on immigration, rather a far more measured approach whose basis is not to supress wages and inflate housing costs.

    Aucklands motorways are grinding to a halt, southern especially, and we’re now routinely discharging raw sewerage into streams and harbours in Auckland because the infrastructure cannot cope and lets not mention housing.

    National very much is a party of another era, the 50’s comes to mind, but without the caring side the government once had for ALL its citizens.

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