The New Zealand ‘Holocaust’

A reader sent in the following link from the Urban Dictionary:

New Zealand Holocaust
The term to describe the massive native population decline in New Zealand. 25 percent of New Zealand college graduates have fled New Zealand, and nearly 20 percent of adult working age New Zealanders do not live in New Zealand. 1000 New Zealanders a week move to Australia to make significantly more money and life better lives in cities that are not crime ridden, tall poppy syndrome ridden, road to nowhere hellholes that exist in New Zealand. 1% of the New Zealand population leaves its country each year.

Did you see that new guy at work? He’s a New Zealander.
Yes, he’s the fifth New Zealander I’ve seen today. They are all coming over here because there’s nothing in New Zealand but sheep and crime ridden cities. It’s like a New Zealand Holocaust over there.

by MARIO VAN FEEBLES Jun 16, 2011

Whilst this is not comparable to a real holocaust I think we get the general (long shore)drift that Mario is trying to convey here.

A few days ago Australian mining company Rio Tinto announced a 6,000 person recruitment drive. Meanwhile across the divide, no prizes for guessing who’ll be pounding the apply now button on Rio’s website.

New Zealand is still struggling to get the Christchurch rebuild underway. What an extra 6,000 pairs of hands couldn’t achieve there huh?

NZ National failed to deliver on its blue sky thinking.

Where there’s a will there’s a way. Whatever happened to New Zealand’s ‘can do’ spirit?

Perhaps Jerry should smile at John and go to Rio. How else are they to stop the  drift across the Tasman?

You may also be interested in today’s news:

Job market ‘challenging’ govt admits

The government is blaming the global financial crisis and the Canterbury earthquakes for a “challenging” job market.

Unemployment rose to 6.7 per cent in the last quarter and at the end of March there were 160,000 people out of work, Statistics NZ said on Thursday.

That’s a 0.3 per cent increase on the previous quarter, which hadn’t been expected.

The labour force swelled to a three-year high and more people were chasing jobs.

Employment Minister Steven Joyce says there’s a gradual and steady increase in the number of jobs available.

“These figures continue to reflect a challenging job market as the country continues to deal with the impact of the global financial crisis and the Canterbury earthquakes,” he said…”

Earlier this week Labour and the Greens urged the government to give the Reserve Bank wider powers to control the exchange rate, warning that hundreds of businesses would go bust if the dollar stayed high”   read more

In the comments section of the article Kiwis say:

“too many kiwis are voting with their passports.That is what i voted last election:pack up to OZ.I wish i could have stayed in NZ but it was financial suicide”

“Increase the minimum wage and people will have more to spend and that will stimulate the economy not to mention encouraging young ones to stay in the country.That is a start but the minimum wage stays the same and prices go up.Someone please organise a portest,all minimum wage earners go on strike and the country will come to a stand still.maybe then they will listen.The country is nothing without the working class.”

NZ ‘Great Place To Raise Kids,’ Not So Great For Teens

Various media outlets are today carrying a story about the release of a new report from the Prime Minister’s chief science adviser, Sir Peter Gluckman, called Improving the Transition. Reducing Social and Psychological Morbidity During Adolescence.

This is how Stuff started its coverage of the report

NZ teens at ‘unprecedented risk’ – report

Adolescents growing up in New Zealand have to navigate a gauntlet of dangers that are putting them at unprecedented risk, a major Government report says.

The report from the Prime Minister’s chief science adviser, Sir Peter Gluckman, says one in five young New Zealanders will face problems as they grow up that will affect the rest of their lives.

Alcohol, depression, drugs, bullying and earlier sexual development are among the issues singled out in the report, which was authored by two dozen leading researchers… read more

You can read a full copy of the report here and we’ve included the executive summary from it below.

Great Place To Raise Kids

Still thinking about moving to New Zealand because you’ve heard it’s a great place to raise kids?

You may want to start by reading our Stats and Facts page about Education and Children’s Issues in New Zealand. This is the first section from that page:

“Aotearoa/ New Zealand has;

• A problem with gangs that are contributing to crime and abuse in the home. Young people are joining gangs for safety and are becoming victims of gang life.
• A problem with bullying – particularly of specific groups like refugee and migrant young people.
• A problem with child abuse which is not just statistics or features in death notices in newspapers but a reality that many of the young story tellers knew and experienced.
• An issue with domestic violence affecting the lives of many children and young people.”
  

          quote from “HEAR OUR VOICES” by  Save the Children, NZ:

Despite statements like the above by Save the Children,  New Zealand is often presented to migrants as a great place to bring up the kids. Is this Marketing hype or just wishful thinking on the part of migrants trying to justify their decisions to leave?

Are you going from frying pan to fire?

“It sounds patronising, but sometimes I feel sorry for New Zealand. We’re a curious anomaly. One day the country is rated as one of the best places in the world to live, most peaceful, best quality of life, best cities to visit, best coastline, best leisure sports. For such a small population, we do incredibly well at certain things and appear, from the outside, to be at one with the environment. Yet, at the same time, there’s high teen suicide and pregnancy rates, high alcohol consumption, high rates of bullying, domestic violence and child abuse.

If New Zealand is such a fabulous place to live, why are we leaving?…” read more on MSN Money NZ…

Teens

The Chief Coroner said he was “shocked and frustrated” by the high number of very young teens (some as young as 13) who drink themselves to death in New Zealand. It’s another symptom of the country’s hard drinking/binge drinking culture.

How would you feel if you found out that your daughter”s school was offering her nicotine patches and other quit smoking products to her and her classmates to wean them off cigarettes. Would you want to be consulted beforehand?

Woud you still move knowing that New Zealand has some of the highest rates of child abuse, teen pregnancy and youth suicide in the world?

How do feel about New Zealand’s problems with youth violence,  human rights abuses in its schools, a bullying culture, the low quality of education and host of other problems including high incidences of diseases more usually associated with developing countries?

Have you thought about your child’s future as they become an adult in New Zealand, will there be sufficient work for them and will they have to leave to have a reasonable chance of a bright future?”

Read more from our facts and stats page

Improving the Transition. Reducing Social and Psychological Morbidity During Adolescence. (Emphasis ours)

Executive summary

• Adolescents in New Zealand relative to those in other developed countries have a high rate of social morbidity. While most adolescents are resilient to the complexities of the social milieu in which they live, at least 20% of young New Zealanders will exhibit behaviours and emotions or have experiences that lead to long-term consequences affecting the rest of their lives.

• An extensive and unbiased review of the relevant scientific literature has been undertaken by a multidisciplinary panel of experts. The key points are summarised in this introductory Synthesis Report, and the main part of the report contains the detailed and domain-specific reviews.

• One dominant message comes through – that application of the international and domestic evidence base to policy formation and programme development in this area will lead to better outcomes for our young people. However, to do so will require a prolonged effort over several electoral cycles and cannot be held hostage to adversarial politics. Our research suggests that many programmes have been introduced, albeit with good intent, that are unlikely to succeed as they are not supported by the evidence base, whereas other approaches likely to be effective have not been implemented. A key challenge is to ensure that all programmes are appropriately monitored to ensure that they are effective and cost effective within the New Zealand context, allowing better use of scarce public resources to support our young people.

• Adolescence is now a prolonged period in the human life course. Its length is influenced by the declining age of puberty as child health has improved and by the rising age at which young people are accepted as adults. This has both societal and biological elements, the latter reflecting recent findings that brain maturation is not complete until well into the third decade of life and that the last functions to mature are those of impulse control and judgement. It is therefore inevitable that adolescence is a period of risk-taking and impulsivity. For many children these are basically healthy and transient behaviours, but for too many there are long-term negative consequences. The key issue is what can be done to change the nature of, and reduce the impact of, these behaviours.

• The evidence shows that the risk of impulsive and antisocial behaviour is greatly increased by experiences earlier in life. It is now clear that early childhood is the critical period in which executive functions such as the fundamentals of self-control are established. Children who do not adequately develop these executive functions in early life are more likely to make poor decisions during adolescence, given the inevitable exposures to risk in the teenage years. It is very clear from our review of the literature that more can be done to improve socialisation and executive function development by reorientation of early childhood programmes. Further, while all children will benefit from these programmes, the evidence is compelling that targeting intensive but costly interventions towards the higher-risk sections of the community has a high rate of social and economic return. Hence the critical importance of adopting a life-course approach to prevention.

• Remediation in adolescence is not likely to be as effective as prevention. Although there are some remediation programmes that are partially effective, others clearly are not. Public and voluntary investment in programmes directed towards at-risk adolescents needs to be re-orientated towards those interventions that can be shown by high quality research to have real impact within the New Zealand context.

• The adolescent brain is clearly more sensitive to both alcohol and cannabis, with long-lasting adverse consequences for far too many. Stronger measures are needed to restrict access of young people to these drugs.

• One cannot overestimate the changed nature of the social environment in which young people find themselves compared with that of previous generations. The nature of peer pressure and role models has been radically altered by exposure to electronically connected social networks and to very different media content. Young people have far greater freedom, engendered by more ready access to funds. While the exact impact of these changes is difficult to ascertain, it is clear that they have radically affected the social pressures that influence adolescent behaviour. This creates challenges for parents and society in establishing boundaries and acceptable behaviours.

• A significant proportion of young people suffer from depression and other mental health disorders, yet the range of services available to them is inadequate. Given New Zealand’s high rate of adolescent suicide and psychological morbidity we suggest that priority be given to addressing this capacity gap and to raising public awareness of the particularities of adolescent depression.

• In general, most of the risky and impulsive behaviours of adolescence reflect incomplete maturation of self-control and judgement. Accordingly, punitive approaches are less likely to be effective than well-established and validated approaches that attempt to remedy these deficits. There is an inherent conflict between the practical focus on using chronological age to determine rights and obligations and the highly individualistic processes of maturation.

• The young people of New Zealand reflect the changing ethnic mix of our population. While the issues and their solutions are generic across all of our population, programmes must be developed and delivered in culturally appropriate ways to the very different communities that now make up young New Zealand. Targeted investments in the ‘long tail’ of educational underachievement and social disengagement will be needed. It is clear that while adolescent morbidity is observed across the whole of our communities, it is disproportionately found within sectors where there is intergenerational disadvantage.

• Social investment in New Zealand should take more account of the growing evidence that prevention and intervention strategies applied early in life are more effective in altering outcomes and reap more economic returns over the life course than do strategies applied later. This will require long-term commitment to appropriate policies and programmes.
Synthesis Report

• The report identifies a number of knowledge gaps that should be addressed.

New Zealand Gets Its Pound Of Flesh From Overseas Graduates

If you are thinking about emigrating to New Zealand now The Battle of the Student Loans should be enough in itself to stop you from going.

Of course if you have children with no aspirations involving higher or further education this won’t be an issue, you can probably stop reading now.

However, the chances are that you won’t. You’re not in the minority either because  immigrants attracted to New Zealand are skilled and well educated, much like you.

The Expression of Interest (EOI) points system is geared to reward those who have higher qualifications. It is reasonable to suppose that we’d want the same, or better, qualifications for our offspring. We also want them to be able to chose to travel at will, rather like we did

We’re worldly-wise enough to know that as post grads they have a better future outside of New Zealand than they do in it. Furthermore, if they were to stay they would be impoverished by a combination of  massive student loans and low salaries (loan repayments start as soon as the debtor earns $19,084) It will take years for them to repay the debt.

The ‘Hotel California’ clause

The New Zealand government government is shooting itself in the foot in its dogged determination to hunt down and bankrupt every kid who ‘defaults’ on his/her student loan just because they’re working abroad.

It would help to clarify the motives for this witch hunt if the government of NZ could agree about exactly how much these overseas graduates actually owe.

When the government was trying to attract overseas graduates home overdue debt was only £183 million, however now the economy is on its uppers that figure has mysteriously  jumped to $2 billion.

What’s more, onshore grads owe almost as much as their offshore cousins, yet it is only the overseas defaulters that are being chased and threatened.

Steven Joyce, Minister for Tertiary Education said recently

“debt collection efforts will be stepped against the 35,000, out of 85,000 Kiwi student borrowers who are currently offshore, who are behind in their payments.

They collectively owe more than $2 billion and “those that have gone off on their OE and stayed … represent roughly 15% of all the people who owe money, but they have about 55% of the overdue debt”…

However, another source says it is only $183 million; quoting a MoE  report:

The report said Inland Revenue had NZ$325 million in overdue loan payments in the year to June, more than half of it owed by nearly 35,000 Kiwis overseas.

The 3,500 New Zealand debtors in Australia owed NZ$15.2 million. Overall, overdue overseas student loan debt had increased from NZ$114 million in June 2009 to NZ$183 million in June, 2010.

Is this really about the money, or is this a wider issue about people made to feel guilty about leaving New Zealand in these days of declining net immigration and austerity measures?

The amount of overdue money owed by NZ expats is nothing like as much as the government has just blown on the new IT system for Auckland supercity - $576 million dollars.

Even Amish kids are allowed a Rumschpringe, no pressure.

The witch hunt was given fresh impetus with a patriotic, if cynical, campaign aimed at getting expat Kiwi grads to ‘contribute towards to the rebuild of Christchurch’ by paying off their student debt. (Heke)

However claw-back and strong arm tactics were firmly on the agenda, long before the Christchurch earthquakes.

In August last year the government was threatening to use debt collectors to recover more from borrowers overseas, but not long before that New Zealand was trying to attract its graduates home by giving them repayment holidays. Read Govt may use student loan debt collectors abroad, NZ Herald 27 August 2010:

“The group (of overdue overseas-based debtors) represented less than 15 per cent of borrowers but 20 per cent of the $11 billion owed…Some students were registered under the three-year holiday period, while others were avoiding coming home because they had not made repayments and now faced very high loans because of interest and penalties; “to some extent they are like refugees“, Mr Dunne said.

This is from the NZ Herald in August of last year.

…(The) Government’s been trying to get the money out of this particular group for years – in 2007, Michael Cullen and Peter Dunne announced a series of measures, including a three-year holiday on repayments and an amnesty for overseas students.

By making it easier for them to repay their student loans, we removed a disincentive for them to return to New Zealand when they were ready, said Dr Cullen, which was benevolent but ultimately futile.

A couple of years earlier, Trevor Mallard and Helen Clark announced an amnesty on penalties on overdue payments for any returning students who entered into repayment schedules – and that didn’t work either.

Now Peter Dunne is back, quoting from the same script, promising to reduce penalties for overseas student loan borrowers.

But by using carrots rather than sticks, the incentive to stay in New Zealand and pay back the money owed to the taxpayer isn’t terribly strong either.

Loan defaulters should be stopped at the border and made to pay back their loan or enter into a repayment schedule before they can leave…”

But even though graduates were given repayment holidays interest was still accruing on their loans, forcing them deeper and deeper into debt. There are also additional fees and penalties imposed after three years which means returning graduates have far larger debts than they left with.

There is another inequality too: the way in which students are charged interest

On 26 July 2005 the Labour Party announced that they would abolish interest on Student Loans, if re-elected at the September election, which they were. From April 2006, the interest component on Student Loans was abolished for students who live in New Zealand.

This has eased pressure on the government from current students. However it has caused resentment from past students many of whom have accumulated large interest loan portions in the years 1992-2006. As stated before many have reluctantly been forced to seek employment overseas in order to pay back their loans, with the UK and Australia gaining benefit from young, educated diaspora…

…The average student loan balance was currently $16,700. The Inland Revenue had written off millions of the debt because of death and bankruptcy. source

It it from those two countries that New Zealand is trying the hardest to reclaim the money.

You can see why making it ‘easier to repay’ had the opposite effect and why New Zealand is now picking up the big stick: They’ve given up all hope of ever attracting these people back, so why not make it harder for other people to leave in future.

For background read

NZ IRD: “You may need to start repaying your loan if you earn over the repayment threshold of $19,084. If you’re overseas the interest rate is 6.6%“

No Escape for Student Loan Expats: – today’s NZ Herald

“Legal action is about to begin against hundreds of New Zealand expats who have not made any effort to repay millions of dollars in outstanding student loans.

From today, authorities will start sending letters to Australia-based defaulters warning that legal action is being taken as a result of their ongoing refusal to pay up.

The letters will be the first step in what will eventually end in court proceedings – and a possible bad credit rating – if repayments are not made…

…defaulters could be ordered to repay or face the consequences, which could include being given a bad credit rating or in a worst case scenario, bankruptcy.

At the moment defaulters only have to pay back outstanding debt, but Mr Joyce said a bill was currently going through the House which would for the first time allow IRD to recall the whole loan.”

E2NZ Revisited: Robert Winston Says NZ Fears Technology And Has Poor Values

This is a blog we originally published in December 2009 and are re-visiting it now to attract discussion, please read our on-going comments section.

Months out from the Rugby World Cup and with the Paul Henry incident, numerous celebrity name suppressions and an ever increasing brain-drain westwards across the Tasman -  has anything changed since this was first written?

Has New Zealand progressed at all since Lord Winston made his observations and how is the social experiment going?

“British Lord Robert Winston, is in NZ for the 2nd International Symposium of Performance Science hosted at Auckland University, the brave man has been voicing his opinions about New Zealand society to the local press. Here are some snippets

TV3 News

“New Zealand is a wonderful country, but it is also a country which I think has some very poor values as well…The fact is that you still rate things like the America’s Cup, the All Blacks and the cricket (as) being far too important when actually they don’t fundamentally improve human wellbeing…You do some fantastically good science and it’s really sad that at the moment your Kiwis are in my laboratory. You are exporting the wrong things, you’re exporting your talent, the very talent which might prop up your economy. But there’s no future for them in this country”

Stuff (Dom Post)
Yahoo.co.nz

“New Zealand celebrates attributes which really aren’t that important…You do it with sportsmen and you don’t do it particularly with intellectuals, for example. In New Zealand, being an intellectual is slightly disadvantageous (ed. only slightly?) and is often seen by the press as being something which is rather well, not to be celebrated.”On the other hand, if you are a great rugby player, maybe parts of your private life which are pretty appalling, will go ignored. It is a society which tends to be driven by sailing, by the All Blacks and by the Bledisloe Cup.”

Ok Robert, so tell us something we didn’t already know! What you are saying will ring a bell with most migrants from developed countries in New Zealand.

What makes for far more interesting reading are the comments from the article caused on Yahoo News’ web pages:

Terence Patrick
“Not to put down our sports stars, but the man is absolutely right. I’d go further and say that if you don’t play along with the accepted dogma in this country you can almost be vilified. I think it’s called ” dumbing down ” the population. Individual excellence is almost anathema!”

Asabeth_Blue
“New Zealanders also, I’ve noticed, seem to suffer from what is known as ‘Tall Poppy Syndrome’. If there is a rising academic or generally clever person, everyone does their best to smother them with things like ‘You need to be like everyone else’, ‘You won’t make any friends that way’, and the more subtle: ‘You should play/watch rugby more.’ And then people get confused when I leave the room whenever these things are …

Maxie
“i do strongly agree with Lord Winston. Being sports minded is good, i got nothing against that. but i did notice that excelling in sports is more glorified, more prestigious in schools, than excelling in the academics, where you have the thinkers. my boys don’t feel as confident in topping tests, they don’t want to be called geeks, but it’s a different feeling for sports. this is a very debatable topic, depending on which side you prefer. my own opinion though is …”

Alexndrtg
“I quite agree with Lord Winston!! Not very long after arriving in New Zealand from London, I was a little more than surprised in fact “gobsmacked”, to be told one day during conversation that, “you will never get a job in New Zealand, with an accent like that!!”. Did they mean? that my English diction was too good, and that maybe I should sound a little bit more inarticulate??”

Gay Hate Crime In Moeraki, New Zealand.

Two North Otago men accused of kidnapping a man last week are facing seven charges including  kidnapping and assault of a male at  Moeraki last Friday, unlawfully entering and remaining in his house and another house at Moeraki, threatening a second man and assaulting him twice.

The charges stemmed from an incident where the men allegedly ordered two men to leave town because of the mistaken belief they were gay. Source

The two accused, a 41 year old man from Oamaru and a 40 year old from Hampden, have had their names suppressed.

Hampden police Senior Constable Darrin Low told Dunedin District Court (on Monday) that one man who had been detained said he had “never known fear like it“. Source

Our thoughts are with the victims and we wish them a full and speedy recovery from their ordeal.

It’s good to see that police are taking this incident seriously and are prosecuting the alleged offenders, however it does highlight how shockingly bigoted and violent some of the more rural areas of New Zealand can be.

But is ‘gay bashing,’ in all its forms, limited just to the rural backwaters of New Zealand, or is there something dark lurking within the collective fragile Kiwi psyche  ?

Air NZ’s Gay Kiss Refusal

Following complaints from gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people Air New Zealand said recently that they will remove a scene from an in-flight safety video where All Black player, Richard Kahui,  refused to kiss a gay flight attendant on the cheek.

The video, which had already been shown to over two million people on Air NZ’s aircraft, apparently without any thought as to whether it may have marginalised or offended some people, also raised concern from a university professor who feared it may have caused gay male suicide. Is it any wonder in a country where ads like this next one are permitted, legitimising homophobia:

Low Carb Beer ‘Queer’

Earlier this month GayNZ reported on an ad campaign by Moa Beer, which suggested that anyone drinking low carb beer was ‘queer’:

“Moa Beer is offering to apologise in person to anyone offended by a t-shirt campaign which suggests low carb beer drinkers are queer, after an outpouring of disgust and disappointment on Facebook.

The boutique brewer’s marketing department was giving away t-shirts which said “Low Carb Beers”, with the a pink ‘Q’ superimposed over the letter ‘B’ so it read “Qeers”, promoting the fact that Moa’s brews are “full strength”.

When asked by GayNZ.com Daily News whether the campaign is saying that anyone who drinks low carb beer must be queer, Moa’s marketing manager replied “yes”, but also so replied “yes” to the question of whether Moa was bothered that it had offended some gay people.

The ensuing story sparked angry backlash on its Facebook page…” read the full report here

So what’s the message here – Homophobia in NZ is acceptable until it results in physical harm and assault?

Comments left on the beer company’s wall included:

“Yesterday a friend of mine was threatened with being bottled, sworn at and called a faggot because he walked down Ponsonby Road holding his boyfriend’s hand.
THIS is why, unfortunately, NZ isn’t mature enough for Moa’s advertisement. I know it’s meant in humour, there are too many people who see that kind of advertising as legitimising their homophobia. Take Toyota and the ‘bugger’ commercials. Suddenly it was acceptable. It was on wheel covers. It was publicly ok to say the word. This will happen with homophobia if advertisements like Moa’s are seen as ok.”

“It’s reading debates like this that I’m pleased I’ve left New Zealand. Considering it’s nearly 2011 it’s amazing how backward kiwis can still be. We need to be more accepting. To those that posted “PC madness” “take a joke” etc., it’s easy to say that when you are part of the majority. Try putting yourself in the shoes… of someone in a minority group and feel what it’s like to be oppressed; dealing with this stuff day in, day out.
ps I’m not gay.
pps won’t be buying the beer.”

“The only people that will take offensive to it are ‘Queers’, I don’t get mad at ads that take the piss out of woman, as a lot of beer adverts do, eg Tui…. I say grow a set of balls and laugh… by the way well done MOA by the reaction this has had it means your advertising has worked!!!”

“Another ‘Like’ just to post on your wall.
I really thought we had made progress, as a country, away from homophobic shyte like your QEER T Shirt campaign.
Like many, I’d never heard of you but the bad news is, now I have, I don’t like you.
Epic PR failure.”

Other stories presently in the NZ News you may be interested in:

Upset by sexual moves, murder trial told

Gay community calls for justice over banjo killing

Thanks to Readerofe2 for the links