nz's economic future

Yeah, but that money was spent funding the US military industrial complex. US arms manufacturers are making a killing selling bombs, bullets and rockets to Ukraine. It is really just one giant ponzi scheme. US arms manufacturers need good quality conflicts around the world to keep the demand up for their products, and the angst of the general public to get Senators to write the cheques?

Why else would the US so readily encourage the slaughter of 40,000 women and children if they didn't have a vested interest making shitloads of money selling the bombs and guided missiles?

NZ Army can't train our gun aimers anymore, Howitzer shells used to cost $2k each, they now cost $8k each, and that is if you can actually get them. Doesn't cost the US manufacturers any more to make, but they do get a quadrupling in profit. Just saying.

Going to the osteopath this week to get my back sorted . The clinic is owned by a brit and 3 of 4 specialist there are immigrants . My folks are friends with an extended South African family they own a dental clinic and an ITM .

Our little road in the bush has a family from Denmark , 3 from the UK , 2 from Germany , 1 from Austria . My partner works at the village daycare and it’s probably half full of immigrants children mostly UK and south Africa but also French and German . I suspect any coastal community or city in NZ will have a very similar make up of world citizens . Many own businesses or are specialists in their area of work . The most popular plumber in our neighbourhood is South African , he actually answers his phone and will come to a job within the week .

We lived in Hamilton for a bit and still have a house there that the sons rent . It’s probably the most multicultural city in the country and I suspect many are refugees . The Somali mosque and community centre was next to our local playground . We had many pleasant interactions with Somali families when the kids played there . 99% percent of the crime in Hams appears to be perpetrated by white and brown NZers .

I agree the statistics are alarming but I think we are fairly safe from the hordes in Europe due to the massive moat around NZ . There’s some alarming memes coming out of the US and the UK but it’s very hard to tell which are real and which are AI or Bots generated by nefarious muppets stirring the pot . The best wedding I’ve ever been to was in “Brum” or Birmingham , the groom was of West Indian descent and the best man was of Pakistani descent . Of about 200 hundred people there the “white” folks were outnumbered at least 5:1 . The after function was bloody awesome , I’ve never met a more friendly or diverse bunch of people .

I don’t think we have an immigration issue but we certainly have an issue with our workforce leaving for better paid jobs offshore

Wonder why they didn't go with this idea?


Professor Robert MacCulloch: Fast Track Approvals Bill - Chris Bishop & Shane Jones Took a Good Idea......



Fast Track Approvals Bill: Chris Bishop & Shane Jones Took a Good Idea & Turned it into a Dog's Breakfast.

To deal with the proliferation of regulation & red-tape in NZ, which means you can barely go to the bathroom without getting permission, National's Chris Bishop & NZ First's Shane Jones told us they would "fast track" a bunch of selected projects. Around 384 projects have applied under this process. Of course projects must be completed faster in NZ. We've had enough of detractors like former PM Geoffrey Palmer wanting to bog NZ down in never-ending legal arguments regarding such matters.



At some level, his way is driven out of self-interest - to create more work for Palmer. Its the same with his views on race relations: a never-ending story of ever more complex legal arguments with the ultimate purpose of giving Palmer more to write about and work on because he claims to be the only one who understands the "nuances" of it all. Give us a break. So its a shame to see that on the fast-tracking issue, Bishop and Jones went and took a good idea and stuffed it up. They sadly politicized the whole thing by wanting to give Ministers the power to make decisions about which projects would be accepted.



After 10 years of pleading with the Nats, which includes personally begging John Key, to take the politics out of these kinds of decisions & leave it to an independent, objective cost-benefit determination, I confess to giving up. Bishop and Jones reverted to National & NZ First's bad old ways. They couldn't help themselves. They wanted to be big men, holding big power, deciding who got what. Now in an embarrassing back-down, they've reversed themselves. They've recommended changing the Fast-track Approvals Bill so "Final decisions on projects will not sit with Ministers but with an expert panel. This is the same as the previous Labour government’s fast-track process".



But they've got it wrong again. Why revert to yet another layer of bureaucracy by setting up a new Labour Party-style "panel", staffed with the usual assortment of in-bred Wellington nobodies or dubious Kiwi "business leaders" with political connections? Will they put Paula Bennett on the panel? Or maybe a property developer who donates money to National?



What should they have done instead? The 384 projects should simply be referred to the NZ Treasury / Infrastructure Commission for evaluation & ranked highest to lowest in terms of benefit-to-cost ratios. Those institutions should send their ranking / recommendations to Cabinet for ultimate sign off. The rankings should be publicly available. Should Cabinet accept a project low on Treasury's rankings, then we'd know it was because they wanted their mates to get the job, unless some very good reason otherwise was presented.



For National to adopt Labour's same fast-track process with an expert panel of nobodies tells us one thing. Both National & Labour have failed to deliver for NZ and they still don't know how.

Having another look at this I think I have interpreted the numbers wrong, the monthly data is an annual rolling average not a total sorry,

Non citizen migrant arrivals 915K over 10 years
NZ Citizen Departures 415K in same time

The Covid departure / arrival thing is well and truly gone, the last two years have not only restored previous trends but doubled and tripled the previous averages.
Just looking at numbers for the last two years
Citizen departures was 116K, (net 65K loss)
Non Citizen arrivals 270K, (net 178K gain)