New Zealand

What can we learn by contrasting Kim Dotcom's experience fighting extradition to the US with Julian Assange's? Watch this fascinating documentary and think about it.

It looks like youtube has removed this excellent analysis of the New Zealand terror attacks, probably because it criticises the unipolar political perspective of the corporate press and big tech platforms. There is an embed code for the video at Press TV Iran's site, but for some reason it does not work. We will therefore simply link to the press tv site. You can click on the video picture to see the debate.

Press TV Iran's impressive and likable anchor, Bardia Honardar, conducts this debate with admirable calm. Terrorist attacks on two mosques in the New Zealand city of Christchurch left nearly fifty Muslim worshipers dead. The 28-year-old Australian-born suspect, Brenton Harrison Tarrant, who apparently acted alone, has published a manifesto praising US President Donald Trump and Anders Breivik, the Norwegian white supremacist who murdered 77 of his compatriots in Norway in 2011. Debating are author and Broadcaster, Jonathan Fryer (LONDON) and the Editor of Veterans Today, Kevin Barrett (MADISON). Fryer really trots out the mainstream corporate press narrative, but Barrett criticises the mainstream corporate press and the major electronic platforms for suppressing information about how violent US-NATO 'intervention' in the Middle East and adjacent regions are causing refugee flight. He also points to programs since the 1950s designed to increase the committment of soldiers to actually kill people - something that does not come naturally to most. These programs encouraged violent racist images of the designated 'enemy' - in order to catalyse unnaturally violent behaviour. He says that this has permeated the mentality of the US military, and that it took hold of mainstream US popular imagination through manipulative reporting of the 9-11 World Trade Centre events. Interestingly, Jonathan Fryer accuses Barrett of conspiracy theory when Barrett talks about the UN Replacement Migration theory, however this comes from an actual UN publication, dated 2001, which has been taken seriously by governments and universities, including Yale University, late last year. [Part of this introduction has been adapted from the one on Press TV Iran.]

Below is the You Tube site where the video was removed or censored.

Sitting Bull (c. 1831 – December 15, 1890) was a Hunkpapa Lakota Sioux holy man who led his locally indigenous people as a war chief during years of resistance to migrant colonisers in what is now South Dakota, USA.]
Read about the Native Americans

Cultural assimilation is about respecting and adopting the prevailing local ways of a place - language, laws, social values, behavioural standards, customs, intermarriage, and spatial distribution across the community, etc. Assimilation is a gradual change process.

Australia's most excessive immigration Prime Minister on record, Kevin Rudd, just gone, by allowing 300,000 immigrants into Australia in 2008 denied any chance of assimilation.

The idiom 'When in Rome, do as the Romans do', is an instructive guide applicable to any land - Australia, Kosovo, Mongolia, Tibet, Saudi Arabia, not just for visitors, but especially for immigrants. A country has no obligation to change and adapt to suit those from foreign soils. Indeed, immigrants have an obligation to be humbly grateful to their new host country and their new hosts. That gratitude deserves the respect of accepting the local ways, not seeking to change them.

Respecting locals, local rights and local values is akin to respecting one's elders - an underpinning principle of all human societies. Those that arrived first have highest moral claim. Nobody has greater right to a place than where they are born. No-one has control where one is born - as such birth rights morally prevail over non-birth (immigrant) rights; indigenous rights morally prevail over immigrant rights.

Where this lore has been savaged through human history is by the use of armed conflict.
That human history has been dogged with rape, pillage and plunder does not make it morally right that it should be repeated. Local rights morally prevail. This is a universal right deserving not just of the human world but also the natural world.

Immigrants rejecting cultural assimilation with the local population are unwelcome invaders by definition. Newcomers by rejecting adoption of the local culture, are disrespectfully asserting an unjustified claim to establish and impose a foreign culture. It is an invasion, albeit short of armed conflict, or what colonists euphemistically term 'annexing', but arguably that is one of the few differences.

Immigrants seeking 'a new life' in Australia or New Zealand have a moral obligation to respect and adopt the ways of life of the local inhabitants, not to impose their foreign ways of life upon their new hosts.

Both Australia and New Zealand immigration policies have historically performed a disservice to both the local population and immigrants alike, by abandoning immigrants in the assimilation process. By ignoring the full cost of assimilation under the cloak of multiculturalism, successive governments may have kept their quarterly cash books in the black, but let the social costs soar. Government immigration responsibility stops not at the airport arrivals gate but after assimilation.

The British were unwelcome invaders when Cook landed at Poverty Bay New Zealand in 1769 and then at Botany Bay, Australia in 1770. Subsequent exploitation, colonisation and mass murder in these islands by the invaders was wrong and immoral and indigenous generations have remained aggrieved and downtrodden ever since. Both histories are of violent invasions of native peoples lands. History cannot be undone, but must not be repeated. The current indigenous peoples remain complex open wounds awaiting healing.

With history unchangeable, it would take many more generations to come to achieve acceptable conciliation by the respective indigenous peoples. This unresolved conflict has a higher priority than adding to the problem with new immigration waves - and that is even if a genuine conciliation process was to start now.

But the national identity problem faced by both New Zealand and Australia stews at the psyche mainly because this process has not even started. It is symptomatic of the national immaturity of both nations.

Instead history has been successively repeated - immigrant wave after immigrant wave. The problems have been compounded because of the lack of assimiliation.
Enclaves of ethnic migrants have cemented themselves and more recently been exacerbated by short-sighted concepts of multi-culturalism, addressing skills shortages, fueling economic growth and allowing massive influx.

It is the disgrace of both these nations that generation after generation they shun conciliation with their indigenous, while generation after generation both nations perpetuate the fragmentation of their societies by encouraging migrants bringing 'old country' baggage with them. Seeking a 'new life' in a new country means just that!
Perhaps New Zealand as always leads Australia in some respect as it questions the 1840 multiple versions of the Treaty of Waitangi and M?ori-P?keh? relations in Aotearoa New Zealand. Australian Aborigines have not yet been offered a treaty. [Read More]

As the immigration wave cycle is allowed to continue without assimilation, the largest populations of the world will ultimately swamp both nations, overwhelming locals, local rights and local values, ultimately with their own. As both New Zealand and Australia are democracies, once the migrant number reach majority, migrants will be in politics and power. Locals will become downtrodden and ultimately extinct like the Thylacene and Moa.

Related articles and comments on CanDoBetter on this issue:

©The Cairns Post


Q1. Why are house prices in urban Australia perpetually rising?
ANSWER:
Demand for housing exceeds supply, particularly in the capital cities. Real estate investors, the real estate industry and property developers seek to maximise their capital gain on selling housing and so seek the highest price on an open unregulated market.

Q2. Why is demand for urban housing exceeding supply in Australian cities?
ANSWER:
Population growth is outpacing the combined rate of sales of existing housing and construction of new housing in the capital cities.

Q3. Why is housing demand so strong?
ANSWERS:
Australian federal and state governments are encouraging business development in the capital cities and so employment opportunities are disproportionately higher in the capital cities. Australian federal and state governments are encouraging urban population growth at rates that exceed the housing supply in the capital cities. Since employment opportunities are disproportionately higher in the capital cities, population growth is disproportionately high in the capital cities.

Q4. Why is housing supply in capital cities not meeting demand?
ANSWER:
Housing in the capital cities is not becoming available at a rate that can keep up with population growth. Housing is not being constructed fast enough to cater for the increased demand in the capital cities. Even when mass housing construction is released, governments are not funding appropriate residential/social infrastructure - schools, public transport, emergency services, recreational facilities, etc to maintain quality of life comparable to established suburbs.

Q5. Why is Australia's population growth so high?
ANSWER:
Net immigration growth is the bulk of the population growth and this is being perpetually and recklessly encouraged by successive pendulous cycle of Lib/Lab political parties with vested interests in the short term profits of growth.

Comment:

The sheer volume of immigrants to Australia are -over-demanding housing forcing housing scarcity and price rises making housing unaffordable to Australians. Governments are encouraging urban property price increases - through excess immigration, and urban-centric economic stimulus, yet all the while neglecting social responsibility for providing urban capacity. As Sheila Newman states on CanDoBetter: "Here in Australia every state government is in the business of raising the price of land beyond the capacity of most people to pay for it, creating exorbitant rents."

Just because many foreign governments allow excessive populations, this does not mean that Australia has to accept foreigners seeking a better opportunity. Beyond Australia's humanitarian obligations to accept refugees fleeing persecution, Australia does not have to accept economic migrants. It is these economic migrants who are displacing Australians from housing, employment, education. Economic migrants are not paying their way and are draining tax revenue to the detriment of indigenous and local Australians.

Once Australia's homeless have a humanitarian safety net of food, shelter, clothing, medical care and educational opportunity, only then should Australia consider extending invitations to foreigners to share the Australian dream of owning one's own home, but then only if carrying capacity permits.

"105,000 Australians are homeless on any given night."
[Source:Homelessness Australia]

This is a national disgrace! It is as if Australia has a 'Migrant First Policy'.

Australian Per Capita Self-Reliance Cost

What is the cost to house, feed, shelter, clothe, provide medical care, educate in literacy and numeracy a person in Australia to enable that person to become independently self-reliant and at an acceptable Australian quality standard of living? From birth to say age 22 when tertiary education will prepare a person for the workforce in the 21st Century, let's say the per capita cost is $1 million. In addition, the costs of providing social infrastructure and economic opportunities to nurture and support one's stable family environment would need to be included. Let's say the per capital cost is then $1.3 million for argument sake.

It thus costs $1.3 million in Australian taxes to get each Australian-born to a minimum self-reliance standard. Many of course will require more resources and time to achieve this and those who are disadvantaged may never reach this ideal standard, so the costs will be higher.

It is with this reality in mind that Australia's social policy and immigration policy needs to be fully realised and publicly costed. The fact that this is deliberately neglected by cyclical Lib/Lab governments at all levels that Australia's living standards are rapidly approaching those of 'Second World' New Zealand.

New Zealand a 'Second World' nation you ask?
Well, the term traditionally referred to Eastern Bloc countries, but times have changed. The term more usefully refers to countries that on the basis of economic prosperity, living standards and quality of life lie between the First World (like most of Western Europe) and the Third World (like most of Africa). Some Third World countries like Malaysia are advancing, while some First World countries like New Zealand are going backwards.

"An international report has found that a sixth of New Zealand children are being raised in poverty - a higher rate than in all but three of the world's 26 rich nations.

The Innocenti Research Centre, established by the United Nations Children's Fund (Unicef), says 16.3 per cent of New Zealand children in 2001 lived in homes that earned less than half the national median income.

Only Mexico, the United States and Italy had higher rates of child poverty."

[Source: 'NZ's child poverty rate one of highest', NZ Herald, Simon Collins, 2nd March 2005].

Further Reading:

Read More about the 'Second World' by author Parag Khanna in his book 'The second world: empires and influence in the new global order.'. Khanna claims this Second World comprises Eastern Europe, Central Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and East Asia, emerging Third World countries such as Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Colombia, Libya, Vietnam, and Malaysia.

However, just as some Third World ('developing') countries are advancing, there are some presumed 'First World' (developed) countries that have allowed their economies and societies to slip below modern First World socio-economic health standards. These include New Zealand, Greece, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Russia, and Portugal. We may refer to retrograde socio-economic as 'nation backsliding'.

The measures determining a country's socio-economic health include a factor of Physical quality-of-life index (PQLI) derived from basic literacy rate, infant mortality, and life expectancy at age one, all equally weighted on a 0 to 100 scale. The measures are also a factor of Gross National Product (GNP) as a measure of comparative economic performance and the UN Human Development Index (HDI) as a comparative measure of poverty, literacy, education, life expectancy, childbirth, and other factors for countries worldwide. HDI measures the average achievements in a country in three basic dimensions of human development:

A long and healthy life, as measured by life expectancy at birth.
Knowledge, as measured by the adult literacy rate (with two-thirds weight) and the combined primary, secondary, and tertiary gross enrolment ratio (with one-third weight).
A decent standard of living, as measured by gross domestic product (GDP) per capita at purchasing power parity (PPP) in USD.

Each year, UN member states are listed and ranked according to these measures. Those high on the list often advertise it, as a means of attracting talented immigrants (economically, individual capital) or discouraging emigration.

An alternative measure, focusing on the amount of poverty in a country, is the Human Poverty Index.

On New Zealand's North Island at the Bay of Plenty, another backyard possum fur trader, BASICALLY BUSH, runs a thriving business slaughtering Brushtail Possum for profit. It's just like the good ol' days of the 19th Century.

It seems the preferred kill method is by shooting..."Be careful not to get rubbish into the bag, and that you don't end up dropping bullets or spent shells in." But then they sell traps to possum poachers as well, so take your pick.

Check out the possum trap called 'Bushmaster No 1':

A good sound trap, leg hold. Freight Costs incl GST: 1 - 12 traps: $6.50 12 - 24 traps: $17.00 24 - 48 traps: $25.00 48 - 96 traps: $65.00 Please add the cost of freight to your payment.

Basically Bush's motto is "SKIN THE BEST and PLUCK THE REST"
It claims "this exciting raw material that has revolutionised the knitwear industry in New Zealand. Possum fibre is referred to as 'possum merino' and is promoted as 'lighter than cashmere'

And profits are healthy. Back in 2007, "there has been a marked increase in fibre availability since we raised the price to $105/kg. "This increase was necessary to make sure that there was enough raw material to meet the needs of domestic production. "

These pest controllers have now gone international, making trips to India to promote fur sales, with brands like 'Snowy Peak' and 'Woolyarns'.

Click here to meet the poaching team.

As the NSW Labor government, in defiance of the wishes of the NSW public without any electoral mandate, and cheered on by the corporate newsmedia, presses ahead with its plans to privatise NSW's electricity assets, the New Zealand Government is moving in the other direction and has renationalised its rail network. It is notable that New Zealand's experience of privatisation since 1993 is precisely the opposite of the claims made of what privatisation will achieve here in Australia. According to NZ Finance Minister Michael Cullen, as reported in the ABC, “The selling off our public rail system in the early 1990s and the running down of the asset afterwards has been a painful lesson for New Zealand“

The ABC News of 5 May 2008 reported:

The New Zealand Government has announced it is buying back the nation's rail and ferry services, 15 years after they were privatised.

Under the deal, Australia's biggest freight company Toll Holdings will be paid $500 million.

New Zealand Rail was sold in 1993 by the then National Government, and then Toll Holdings bought it and split the business.

Under the deal, Toll gets to keep its freight forwarding operations, but the New Zealand Government will have complete control of the rail network.

The railways were re-nationalised in order to encourage companies to use rail to transport freight rather than road, as a response to climate change and the spiraling cost of petroleum. The New Zealand government was driven to re-nationalise the railways after a long-running dispute with Toll Holdings over who would bear the costs of upgrading the rail network.

Seemingly, in response to the evident popularity of the Labour Governments' move, the opposition National Party announced that it would not sell off any state-owned enterprise in its first term of office if elected this year. The apparent consensus now against privatisation instead of for privatisation drew a critical response from the New Zealand Business Roundtable in a media release of 8 May. The media release also took aim at other moves towards renationalisation and government intervention in the NZ economy:

… the buy-back of Air New Zealand … the establishment of Kiwibank, the renationalisation of ACC, and the Auckland Regional Council’s reversal of the part-privatisation of Ports of Auckland.;

The case in favour of privatisation largely rested upon the familiar ‘everyone is doing it’ argument:

A few years ago the World Bank observed that “Privatisation is now so widespread that it is hard to find countries not using the approach: North Korea, Cuba and perhaps Myanmar make up the shrunken universe of the resistant.”

They neglected to mention popularly elected Latin American governments in Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia, who are now in the process of undoing the theft of publicly-owned assets enacted either under the guns of by murderous military dictatorships, or, in the case of Bolivia, by the betrayal of popular trust by supposedly ‘democratic’ left-of-centre governments (see "The Shock Doctrine", (2007 by Naomi Klein)).

Naturally, they couldn‘t resist contrasting New Zealand ‘unfavourably‘ with Australia where both sides of politics, Labor and Liberal, at both the state and federal level still enthusiastically embrace privatisation:

Currently the New South Wales government is battling with trade unions to privatise its electricity generators. Victoria (under the Liberal government of Jeff Kennett) did so in the mid-1990s, ...

The government of West Australia is looking at private ownership of its water utility and the Queensland government is selling airports and entering into public private partnerships to build schools.

Australia has private prisons and many infrastructure PPPs (Public Private Partnerships).

The media release cited other supposed success stories of privatisation: Germany, The Netherlands, Ireland, and quoted politicians from the UK, where, in spite of Labour having been in government since 1997, privatisation is still the orthodoxy.

The media release cited a A Business Roundtable study which estimated that failure to privatise could cause NZ to miss out on a 1% increase to its Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Even if this could be substantiated, the GDP, which counts all economic activity, including, for example, repairs necessitated by natural or man-made disasters as positives, is hardly a reliable measure of true prosperity. Indeed, it would be not be hard to envisage how the financial paper-shuffling and the additional complexity necessitated by government regulation of privately owned utilities could be construed by the Business Roundtable as adding to NZ's prosperity.

The media release cited the results of a push poll recently conducted by proponents of privatisation in NSW:

A recent survey found that two out of three NSW residents don’t care whether the state government or business runs the electricity industry.

The media release made no mention of another poll conducted on behalf the Union movement of NSW found that 85% of the NSW public opposed privatisation. Those results are consistent with every other poll conducted on privatisation in Australia in recent years which, without exception, showed overwhelming public opposition to privatisation even in the face of relentless pro-privatisation propaganda by business leaders, the government and by the corporate newsmedia. When the NSW Liberal opposition put a platform for the full privatisation of electricity to the NSW public in the elections of 1999 it was roundly defeated.