Winston bowls Luxon a googly on Indian free trade

ByMartyn Bradbury

Winston just bowled Luxon a googly on Indian free trade…

India trade talks: Winston Peters pours cold water on immigration changes

New Zealand First’s Winston Peters sees no need for a relaxation of New Zealand’s immigration settings in any trade talks with India.

He told Morning Report on Monday any liberalisation of the country’s immigration settings would provide an unnecessary “incentive”.

The Prime Minister has just returned from a five-day trip to India where he held bilateral talks with his counterpart Narendra Modi, and announced the beginning of official trade talks between the two countries.

While Sir John Key tried in both 2011 and 2016 to get a free trade agreement off the ground, talks never really progressed, and under the previous Labour government the focus shifted to more achievable deals with the likes of the United Kingdom and the European Union.

Dairy access for New Zealand’s exporters is the big sticking point with India, due to its economy being made up of a number of small farmers – some with only one or two cows each – who fear the impact a big milk producer like New Zealand would have on their livelihoods.

Progressing an FTA with India that doesn’t include dairy, however, is seen as a non-starter by both the New Zealand dairy sector and trade experts.

One area important to India that could be used as a bargaining chip by the coalition is immigration and any freeing up of New Zealand’s settings to make it easier for Indians to gain residency.

In 2019 the Indian community in New Zealand spoke out against a change in approach by immigration officials to partnership visas, which insisted couples had to spend time living together in order to be eligible.

The change in directive required immigration officials to stop waiving requirements, such as couples needing to have lived together for 12 months – a test Indian couples who have had arranged marriages can’t meet.

…Winston attacking Labour and sinking Luxon on India immigration, it’s like he is constantly in election mode just in case he needs a snap election before Nicola Willis’s next brutal budget massacre.

So what does India actually want from us and what do we want from them?

Luxon is trying to curry favour with India as we desperately scramble to geopolitically decouple from China and bewilderingly attempt to make India our new China, but is India a trading alternative from an authoritarian regime with questionable human rights practices OR is India another authoritarian regime with questionable human rights practices?

Arundhati Roy: The dismantling of democracy in India will affect the whole world

I thank the Charles Veillon Foundation for honoring me with the 2023 European Essay Award. It may not be immediately apparent how delighted I am to receive it. It’s even possible that I am gloating. What makes me happiest is that it is a prize for literature. Not for peace. Not for culture or cultural freedom, but for literature. For writing. And for writing the kind of essays that I write and have written for the past 25 years.

They have mapped, step by step, India’s descent (although some see it as an ascent) into first majoritarianism and then full-blown fascism. Yes, we continue to have elections, and for that reason, in order to secure a reliable constituency, the ruling Bhartiya Janata Party’s message of Hindu supremacism has relentlessly been disseminated to a population of 1.4 billion people. Consequently, elections are a season of murder, lynching and dog-whistling – the most dangerous time for India’s minorities, Muslims and Christians in particular.

It is no longer just our leaders we must fear, but a whole section of the population. The banality of evil, the normalisation of evil is now manifest in our streets, in our classrooms, in very many public spaces. The mainstream press, the hundreds of 24-hour news channels have been harnessed to the cause of fascist majoritarianism. India’s Constitution has been effectively set aside. The Indian Penal Code is being rewritten. If the current regime wins a majority in 2024, it is very likely that we will see a new Constitution.

It is very likely that the process of what is called “delimitation” – a reordering of constituencies – or gerrymandering as it is known in the US, will take place, giving more parliamentary seats to those Hindi-speaking states in North India where the BJP has a base. This will cause great resentment in the southern states and has the potential to balkanise India. Even in the unlikely event of an electoral defeat, the supremacist poison runs deep and has compromised every public institution that is meant to oversee checks and balances. Right now, there are virtually none, except a weakened and undermined Supreme Court.

…I’m not sure moving our trade from an Authoritarian Communist Regime that is committing cultural genocide and mass repression to a Racial Supremacist Fascist State that is committing hate crimes is really all that much of a win for New Zealand ethically.

Our trade is jumping out of the Chinese pan and into the Indian fire while our American Capitalist masters demand more heat.

India doesn’t want our Dairy, they want access to NZ for their citizens.

Modi may well be a race baiting extremist who is bordering on authoritarian overlord, but he ain’t no fool! India’s own subsidies on food to ensure they can feed their own massive population is a far more national strategic goal than allowing a tiny farm deep in the South Pacific to sell them food to undermine their own farmers.

We don’t produce anything they want, what we do have is literal population space, and that’s what they want!

India wants more path ways to residency and they want more educational opportunities to study in NZ, that are then linked to pathways to residency.

Seeing as NZ is already over run with exploitative migrant NZers who exploit their own fellow migrant citizens supported by a low wage addicted host population happy to exploit both, that seems like a rotten deal all around.

What we SHOULD be doing is focusing on our woeful skills shortage and when I say skills shortage I don’t mean importing Indian students to be exploited at the local bottle shop or Tobacco retailers, I mean bringing in more engineers and drs. NZ Universities should have  Campuses set up in India that allow Indian students to upgrade there so they can pick up skilled jobs in NZ.

Simply allowing more Indian students to come to NZ to be exploited here with no real promise of residency or high skilled job is a disservice to them as guest and an abuse of us as hosts.

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15 Comments

  1. Do you really think Luxon gives a fuck at the end result of flooding NZ with another million poor people .That just gives him more bottom feeders to kick around .As if we dont already have rising poverty he will have a target of having more so his doners will nominate him for a knighthood .He will also be working with those doners to ensure Winston is not able to be in Paliament next time round .As NZ first has no elected MPs they rely on getting over the 5% .There thankfully is not that amount of voters in the river of filth rabbit hole dwellers in NZ .So the big money boys will be instructed not to fund NZ first this time or they will lose the rights to sell tobacco and what ever else they wish to peddle .

  2. Out of idle curiosity, might it be possible to educate, train, and upskill New Zealanders into the engineering and medical professions? Or are they too thick, or too lazy, or what?

    1. There are New Zealanders who are already trained as engineers and possibly doctors etc. who have been made redundant or cannot get jobs because this mad govt. while encouraging huge immigration, has stopped govt. contracts on building new schools and hospitals.
      NZers are not ‘too thick’. They are already trained and here and they have been dumped because to build new schools and hospitals is now deemed wasteful by these fools who try to run the country.
      Existing schools are bursting at the seams. Shoe box apartments are being built in their thousands and presumably there will be no children in them because not one new school is being built for them.
      The redundancies are nothing to do with talent or a lack of it. They are to do with the type of projects the engineers were dealing with.
      These projects take planning so unless money is loosened up soon, those trained and very talented engineers will look elsewhere.

    2. It would be great Filthy but this Coc is dismantling our once great educational system because they are anti teacher.

    3. There are many NZers who are capable of being perfectly good doctors who cannot win admission to our medical schools. We could train more, but that costs money and DHBs would have to employ them in hospitals to reduce patient-doctor ratios, which also costs money. Then we have to retain them in NZ, which (again) costs money. Should all these funding issues be overcome, many of these additional graduates might go on to become specialists, but the professional Colleges guard admission to specialties so assiduously, that it almost appears that they are trying to manufacture the sort of shortage that leads to massive salaries in the private sector. Who’d have ever imagined that cartel-like behaviour would become a thing once you allow a market in healthcare to exist?

    4. No, clearly we must import every graduate of Lovely Professional University instead, thus delivering the worst result for everyone (including India being drained of any competent personnel, however substandard).

  4. The over immigration unbalanced immigration needs to stop.

    Take a look at this.
    https://figure.nz/chart/uWlUWJy4vdXpMxhJ

    NZ needs to ensure NZ has real full employment and a fixed housing crisis and an infrastructure catchup before more migration. If the economy was run in the interests of the people that chart would show plenty of people from the first world lining up to come here too.

    And NZ needs to have a policy on how many people its land, environment and economy can support. I can’t see that additional migration creates more Fair Go for the average kiwi. Does more migration make life easier or increase per capita GDP for the bottom 50 percent.

  5. Henry the filth you are the one that sounds dumb as what did national do to our Dunedin Hillside railways workshops full of brilliant engineers, they got rid of them and Labour had to try and tidy up there mess.

    1. Henry once stated that NZ could become rich overnight by simply making butter instead of whole milk powder, as the price per tonne was double at the time.
      Now, not only was he a großes dummes Kind to think kiwis were incapable of coming up with such a brilliant idea without his input, he didn’t even understand that butter is not actually made from milk but from cream.
      That’s the problem with dealing with the right. The combination of stupidity and arrogance makes rational discussion almost impossible.

  6. “Simply allowing more Indian students to come to NZ to be exploited here with no real promise of residency or high skilled job is a disservice to them as guest and an abuse of us as hosts”.

    Yes, the devil is in the detail. If the work-to-residence visa remains a category, a good many graduates with 3-year qualifications will be seeking work, PR and ultimately citizenship – and all the stuff that goes with arranged marriage and family reunification. That’s the carrot. And in principle NZ gets 3-year educated graduates, again in principle, in needed skills areas. The issue for many on work-to-residence visas however is that much of the employment they are offered after graduation won’t meet the income threshold – with little hope of residency at the end. Unwitting graduates hoping for residency will simply be exploited, most often by Indian operators already here. But then, under some trade deal Immigration NZ may shift the goal posts for Indian students and lower the income threshold. Not that we’d get gist of that without application to OIA.

  7. Fuck free trade. We should go all mercantilist dragon like the rest of the world is going. Hard right or hard left – DGAF – let’s just get hard.

  8. I’m sure Chris Hipkins, as the leader of New Zealand’s largest supposedly left wing party, will be joining Peters in criticizing Luxon’s policy of supporting the importation of anyone who has completed even a one year course at one of India’s prestige universities like TIT&S Bhiwani, or perhaps a Java course at DurgaSoft.

    Haha, just kidding, we all know Hipkins supports destroying the job market for New Zealanders and driving the property ponzi.

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