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[–]Jacinda 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

The economy demands growth and growth demands immigration. No thought is given to the sort of society that doubling our population will create or to the lowering of New Zealander's living standards and the sacrifices that giving our country away to immigrants will entail.

Great news if you are an overseas banker benefiting from the mortgages taken out to pay for our ever escalating house prices or an already wealthy businessperson who wants cheap labour and ever more bug-men to consume your product. Hell for everybody else.

Mike Rendell (who says he is is concerned about the country his children will inherit) has been banging on about the dustructiveness of population growth for ages. He points out that by importing the third world, we become the third world; our burgeoning population destroys productivity (as well as the environment) locking us into a low-wage economy from which young New Zealanders flee:

Croaking Cassandra — Large scale non-citizen immigration to New Zealand is making us all poorer

[O]ur immigration programme, which has now run this way for almost 30 years is really much more deserving of the label Think Big: it is bigger, has skewed the economy more, has lasted longer, and has done much more to damage the prospects of New Zealanders living here. There has been a central planners’ conceit that we can simply ignore what NZers are doing - leaving, typically in large numbers - and bring in lots of (modestly skilled) foreigners, and concentrate them in Auckland.

[Snip...]

[We] should stop the mythmaking, and revert to being a normal country - one that makes its own prosperity, with its own people - rather than endlessly hankering (as our officials and ministers constantly seem to) after some better class of people over the water who, if only we could get them, in enough numbers, might finally reverse our century of decline. It simply won’t happen. [Cont...]

Plenty more such papers on his blog.

He of course is only writing only about the economic aspect. Diversity is division. It's ridiculous to think, for example, a group of Maori elders are incapable of getting anything done but throw in a gay Muslim, a British skinhead, a Hindu chauvinist, and a Mexican transexual and now you are rocking.

They need to interview sociologists who understand biology, urban planners who know how to create livable cities, and deep ecologists who understand the importance of nature.

My own policy would be to educate people about the obvious problems of overpopulation. What sort of country do we want people, already in their 20s, to inherit? My own preference woul be to gradually reduce our numbers to about 3.5 million and to make NZ one of the best countries in the world to live in.