NZ 4 years on, Bitter/Sweet – Part 2
This is Part 2 of my recent NZ experience. Sadly, New Zealand is a different place than even 5 years ago. Some of what I will write about has been trending for a while whilst some is more recent. The sentiments expressed here are actually shared by a number of expats on the Grounded Kiwis (the Facebook group that successfully challenged the government over MIQ and did a lot to push the plight of kiwis stranded overseas) and Kiwis in USA Facebook pages. Please note that these are my personal observations and opinions and not those of Kiwiblog. As a preview I will be covering 6 topics:
PART 2 – THE BITTER
1 – STANDARD AND COST OF LIVING SQUEEZE
2 – COVID SCARS
3 – EXCESSIVE MAORIFICATION
PART 3 will cover Health Care, Crime and Anti-Democratic Trends.
1 – STANDARD AND COST OF LIVING SQUEEZE
All the 1st world economies flooded their populaces with cheap borrowed money to try to overcome the financial burdens of the Covid lockdowns. This was even more the case in NZ due to the number and length of the lockdowns. Inflationary pressures and the skyrocketing cost of living is an issue in many countries. What makes the impact on NZ harder was a trend that was already happening pre-Covid and has now accelerated, that of a gradual relative standard of living decline. When I moved to the US in the 2000’s, there was a standard of living gap between NZ and Australia, Canada, the UK and the US but it wasn’t too wide. As the decades have rolled forward, over time this gap has slowly and gradually widened. The biggest culprit is the rapid increase in housing costs in NZ. The gold standard of comparative housing affordability is the Demographia Report which divides the median house price by the median income in dozens of global city markets. This survey technique eliminates any currency conversion issues. In the first edition in 2005, Auckland was at a multiple of 5.9 (i.e. the median house cost 5.9 times the median annual income). By 2022, it had mushroomed to 11.2 and the 85th least affordable city out of 92 global city markets assessed with Wellington and Christchurch coming in as somewhat more affordable. Auckland ranks virtually equal with the five most expensive cities in the US. There are 26 metro areas in the US (most the size of, or bigger than, Auckland) that have multiples HALF OR LESS in the unaffordability measure. Plus, a fact not factored in, is the quality of NZ’s housing stock which on average is well below the average of the other Anglophile countries that feature often larger, warmer and more modern/modernized homes. Modern NZ homes certainly are equivalent but there are 120m² homes on Auckland’s North Shore built in the 1950’s or ‘60’s worth over $1 million with no central heating or air conditioning, no double glazing with a single old bathroom and an original condition kitchen whereas a much higher percentage of homes in similar high value cities in say North America will have all these features built in.
The impact of this: aside from the mega rich (of whom there are very few in NZ) and a small number of exporter and high-tech entrepreneurs based on Auckland’s North Shore and in Wellington’s mini–Silicon Valley, is that all broad income cohorts in NZ have declined a notch over the last 20 years. Upper middle class income earners’ standard of living today is akin the main middle class 20 years ago, the broad middle class are where the upper echelon of the wage earning working class were 20 years ago and the upper reaches of the manual/blue collar class are now struggling with the kinds of net discretionary spending they enjoyed when they were early in the work force. The current cost of living crisis layers on the top of the standard of living squeeze brought on by the explosion of property values and rents with the following currently discernable impacts: fewer overseas holidays even after the borders reopening (now made worse by recent declines in the NZD), less eating out or eating more at lower cost venues, people hanging onto cars longer, domestic holidays closer to home to save on petrol, less money on fancy clothes and the deferring of things like dental visits and other lifestyle crimps. I observed two tell tale signs of an increase in poverty in NZ: the rise of homelessness well documented in various media and seeing people begging in public. For the first time in my lifetime, I was approached for money going into two petrol stations (one on Auckland’s North Shore and one in the northwest of Christchurch). That has never happened to me before in NZ and I was shocked. Yes, versions of the cost-of-living crisis are happening in Australia, North America and Western Europe but in NZ, it’s a little more pronounced and it accelerates the feeling I’d had pre Covid, that the standard of living gap between NZ and other 1st world economies continues to widen.
2 – COVID SCARS
I have called this section Covid Scars because New Zealand, unlike most 1st world countries, still shows more outward effects of Covid, they are more deeply rooted and they are lasting longer. This is a function of the government’s border closure policy that effectively kicked NZ’s Covid can down the road for about 18 months from the first major lockdowns in March 2020 to the eventual surrender on Delta in October 2021. For most countries, they learned to live with Covid and lifted many of the various restrictions much quicker. This is manifested in various ways:
(i) Travel declaration – to travel to NZ regardless of citizenship, up until a couple of weeks ago, you had to complete an online form that took usually ten minutes and had various traps for the uninitiated and those not IT savvy. As a part of the Grounded Kiwis Facebook group, the number of times people reported they had to call the Immigration NZ help lines to overcome hurdles was staggering. It was an onerous and pointless requirement once the pre-departure C-19 tests were scrapped in June 2022. Almost all 1st world countries had scrapped such requirements by early or mid-2021.
(ii) Masks – the wearing of masks in most of the US (outside of the major cities in the strict states like CA, OR, WA, NV, NM, IL, MN, NY, PA, CT, MA and MI) had dwindled to less than 5% no matter what the location. Once the FAA scrapped the requirement for wearing masks on flights, mask wearing on planes went from near 100% to hardly any. I was shocked to see all the mask wearing when I landed in NZ. Soon into my stay, the mask mandate was lifted but I was on a domestic flight when the mandate was in force and my sister and I (we both have NZ Ministry of Health exemptions) were the only passengers on a full Air NZ jet flight maskless. A week later on a Jetstar flight after the lifting of the mandate, 20% of passengers were still wearing masks. Various friends have traveled to Europe through this most recent northern hemisphere summer and found mask wearing in the UK and across Europe virtually nonexistent. Given various studies that showed the common blue cloth masks and cloth bandana type masks had no effect on stopping the spread of Covid (the size of the Covid particle has been tested as multiple microns smaller than the small holes in cloth masks), these requirements were little more than a form of global virtue signaling – an easy way for politicians to be seen to be doing something to keep people safe. Yes, N95 surgical masks have been shown to help in certain situations but at over $100 a pop, use of them was not widespread. Once again NZ’s Covid can kicking left children forced to wear masks in schools far far longer than anywhere else in the world (possible exception being Asia where mask wearing has been common for decades).
(iii) Fear of Covid has evaporated in the red states in the US as almost everyone has had it and very few have had major issues. I am happy to furnish the results of a survey done in a friend’s tight knit church community of about 300 where all parishioners were surveyed as to Covid experiences. Only a handful of people remain fearful (the very elderly and some who are immuno-compromised). The level of fear towards Covid in NZ was palpable. No one in my red state ever inquired after my vaccine status either officially to gain entry anywhere nor privately to gauge whether I was safe to be around. In NZ, the QR codes to enter (no longer in use when I arrived) were everywhere attesting to the ubiquity (at least for a period of time) of the use of this method to determine vaccine status. I was also asked multiple times by people I knew if I was vaccinated and was shocked at the casual intrusion into a private medical question that had become routine in NZ.
(iv) Isolation rules crippling workplaces – these isolation rules are still in place. A family member personified the pernicious impact this is still having on the NZ economy. This person was taking regular RAT tests of them and their teenage child in the hopes that one would test positive so they could have a fully paid week off work! Anecdotal tales abound of the countless people across NZ who abused this provision to take time off work. The negative impact of this policy was immediately obvious in …..
(v) Long waits due to staff shortages everywhere because of the ridiculous and onerous isolation rules such as: queues in various shops to pay for things (except supermarkets where self-checkout is now common and works well), calling government departments – I had to call Immigration NZ, Ministry of Justice (speeding fine) and the Department of Labour and all three used to be quite accessible on prior trips and all had between a 45 minute and FOUR HOUR wait. This was also true of private companies where I waited for hours to speak to someone at Kiwibank and Air NZ. My brother waited 3 hours for the AA to attend to a breakdown on the Southern Motorway in Auckland and calling St Johns Ambulance for the family member who eventually passed away in hospital involved a wait of several hours and this was in a suburb of a major city not some remote country town.
(vi) Impact on children’s education – the length and depth of the NZ (especially Auckland) lockdowns has had the most pernicious and avoidable impacts on school aged children. Global studies on the impact of keeping children out of in-person school learning show learning damage in direct proportion to the strictness or otherwise of the Covid stay-at-home policy. In red states with few exceptions, children were back to in-person learning maybe 1 or 2 months after they commenced the school year late in the summer/Fall of 2021. Some blue states had kids still learning from home well into 2021 and kept masks on kids well into 2022! The most devastating impact of NZ’s lengthy period of time that children were kept out of schools is the now catastrophically high truancy rate. It was already higher than most 1st world countries pre-Covid but now entire swaths of south Auckland, Porirua and east Christchurch have Maori and Pasifika families whose children now work out of financial necessity and many more now chronically truant and essentially severed from the tenuous roots of formal education they once had. The long-term negative impact of this on New Zealand’s overall economic and societal wellbeing, not to mention the mental health and crime rates of so many young people of colour estranged from the education system, is incalculable.
(vii) More widespread hospitality business failure – it was sad to see the numbers of suburban hole-in-the-wall restaurants that were shut down. In my city in the US, because the lockdown rules allowed take aways even during the very first “Shelter in Place” order, the only restaurants that failed were two national chains of All you can eat Buffets headquartered in strict blue states that had NZ style lockdowns. A friend in Auckland wanted to take me out to dinner at a favourite Italian restaurant located in a prosperous suburb. He said he had to book days in advance even for a weeknight because so many of the restaurant’s competitors had closed that demand was constantly through roof. This was not a fancy restaurant and yet the mains were $38, pricing he said was so high partly because of the high demand. Almost all of the smaller privately owned NZ car rental firms have gone under due to the border closure. Fortunately, the one I often use managed to survive. In one location when picking up a car, I asked a staff member how they survived. He said they furloughed almost all staff, and they had one staff member on duty at what was once a busy site serving the few essential travelers through the long Auckland lockdown. The owners have had to borrow big to stay afloat and were able to just survive until the borders opened. Their competitors were not so lucky.
(viii) Divisiveness over vaccine mandates – it is on this matter that I have seen the most Covid related damage to NZ society. A family member is a teacher and became subject to the vaccine mandate. They actually refused to disclose their status and this refusal eventually cost them their job. In time, and before the education sector mandate was eventually lifted, the Board of Trustees, thanks to the encouragement of a most amazingly compassionate and understanding Principal, non-student contact aspects of the job were offered back working night times or weekends. It is difficult to describe the agony and ignominy suffered by the minority of NZers who believed the taking of a medical procedure should never be a matter of compulsion. This story can be told across NZ and inside many families. First there is the financial uncertainty for many and some lost homes and businesses due to no longer being able to pay mortgages. In the case of my family member, their spouse, who also remained unvaccinated, was able to work from home and they survived. It wasn’t just being unable to go to restaurants, hair salons and cafes or being able to attend sports or other entertainment events, it was things like being forced to attend a separate unvaccinated church service for an outcast group of freedom minded folk who were treated by fellow parishioners like recalcitrant lepers. This matter divided our family awfully with the embattled unvaccinated loudly pressing their case and some of the vaccinated making snide and dismissive comments designed to apply pressure. The widespread presumption of going along with the status quo and the opprobrium and sometimes nasty comments directed at those who chose medical freedom was one of the most unedifying spectacles I have ever seen in NZ. The emotional wrenching across families on this matter has left a massive invisible scar that IMO will be a long stain on life in NZ. In the US such mandates were limited to a few sectors, states and school districts with the vast majority of people untouched by mandates and the few that were enacted were all progressively rolled back being deemed quickly and easily as unconstitutional by appellate Federal Courts. Just recently the Supreme Court of New York, one of America’s most liberal states and a state with a Covid regime closest to what happened in NZ, ordered employees of the City of New York fired for not being vaccinated not only back to work but on full back pay with massive daily fines if NYC fails to heed their order. Similar rollbacks have been ordered by the new Italian government and by the new conservative Premier of Alberta who went further and proffered an apology to the unvaccinated who had been fired due to noncompliance.
3 – EXCESSIVE MAORIFICATION
Lest I ever be accused of racism, I believe my experiences and closeness to Maori and Maori culture far exceed those of the average white middle class Pakeha. I grew up with Maori and Samoan kids attending Cub Scouts then a community youth group, our family was very close to a Maori family, and we holidayed together for years, one of my sibling’s has married into a wonderful Maori family and for some years until his recent bereavement, my NZ business partner was Maori. He learned te Reo at the feet of a remote living native speaker and learned much of the ancient Maori language and culture and he was fluent and an amazing educator of old Maori ways. I learned from him to pronounce Maori place names properly decades before it became a new white liberal virtue signaling habit. I have watched the promotion of te Reo with pleasure knowing what it meant to Maori friends and I support the Kohangareo and Te Kura Kaupapa Maori language learning developments. But this trend is now being taken to ridiculous levels:
(i) Place names – the trend of calling major cities by their Maori name is silly and has gone too far. Most of the names are affectations and not what traditional Maori called the area as often the new European settlements were built on land Maori rarely used so local hapu had no names of substance for the area. This is doubly true of the word ”Aotearoa”. This was never the ancient Maori name for New Zealand indeed it is never mentioned in the 1835 Maori Declaration of Independence nor in the Treaty of Waitangi’s Maori translation and only began to be used occasionally in the 1860’s and even then, it was a name that only a few northern tribes used to sometimes describe the North Island and Great Barrier Island. It crept into more common usage after the Maori King Movement first identified a village then in the region around the King movement land as Aotearoa and the King Movement’s nationwide ambition gave this name added currency but not until the turn of the century. The “Land of the Long White Cloud” approximate translation didn’t appear until the 1920’s and 30’s It was decided for almost marketing reasons to use it to apply to the whole country because of its rather cool mythical sounding touristy translation. New Zealand’s entire prosperity relies on its exports – without the dairy, meat, fruit and tourism, we don’t have an economy. Decades of marketing and hundreds of millions have been spent by government agencies and private companies small and large to build Brand New Zealand and here we are toying with the idea of renaming the country Aotearoa, a name that is meaningless to the rest of the world and really only the desired primary name of a tiny influential elite of Maori activists and progressive media influencers.
The same is equally true of city names. Auckland is an internationally renown city and New Zealand is still a majority white society. It’s understandable that Rhodesia, a nation that was ruled by a 15% white minority, would want to change the name of its country and capital to a majority African name. Ditto the Indian cities that have eschewed their colonial Anglicised names in favour of proper Hindi local names. But South Africa, also majority black and with the awful history of white oppression via apartheid, has not changed to the African name Anzania nor have the names of the major English named cities Cape Town and Durban and the three major Afrikaans named cities (Pretoria, Bloemfontein and Johannesburg) changed their names. A culturally aggressive elite are trying to force name changes onto an almost 80% white population to the language of a minority comprising 15% of the population. We put a potential flag change to a referendum vote, we should do the same for Aotearoa at the national level and each of the major cities at the regional level. Brand NZ is too important to throw away on progressive white liberal and Maori radicals’ whims.
(ii) The same is true for the trend to call Government departments by their Maori names. By all means have the Maori translation on the letterhead and office signage but that is not enough, the white majority must be forced to call all the institutions of the State by the language spoken by 1% of the population. What benefit does this bestow? It doesn’t stop there; you get any written communication from a government department or agency, and you get the obligatory Maori greetings and salutations at the beginning and end. Again, does this improve service delivery or outcomes? It appears to be just more virtue signaling.
(iii) Treaty related decision making. It has reached the ridiculous point where virtually all government decisions and policies have to be made on the basis of how they will affect our Treaty partners. Advancement in the public service, even initial hiring, now is dependent on knowledge of the Treaty and its role in a particular government agency. The next step will be a requirement for advancement to senior ranks of the bureaucracy for fluency in Te Reo.
(iv) NZ seems hellbent on adopting a nationwide central government-controlled health system akin to Britain’s lumbering NHS. The supposed efficiencies of this move remain to be seen. But what is far more pernicious and worrying is the creation of the Maori Health Authority. This is a form of legislated health separatism and the poor health outcomes of Maori are going to be addressed not by necessarily increasing proper and better targeted spending on specific Maori issues but progressively over time by commandeering a greater percentage of the overall Vote Health to fund what will become in essence over time a separate Maori health system that will use as an excuse in taking a larger slice from the remaining system the need to redress the imbalance in Maori health. This is nothing more than reverse health apartheid.
(v) The extent to which the Labour Government are prepared to secede power and sovereignty to Maori iwi is demonstrated in the 3 Waters reforms. Under the guise of improving New Zealand’s sometimes inadequate tap, storm and waste water management, Labour have rammed through a complex ownership model that removes decision making over billions of dollars of water assets into the hands of four regional water authorities that have no accountability to any elected office holders (as is the case with current council ownership) and the governance of this body is subject to a board that is required to have 50% Maori representation. Thus 15% of the population now have effective veto rights over all decisions concerning massive water related assets and future expansion. This reform is done over the objections of a majority of councils and for which there was consultation that raised massive objections across the country but was completely ignored.
When will the Maorification of NZ society end? An arbitrary name change of the country and all British originated city and town names? Compulsory te Reo in schools at the cost of billions and the opportunity cost of students foregoing precious classroom time for a language that the world cares zero for over subjects that can further NZ’s trading prowess globally? Will we be seeing a completely separate criminal justice system with violent criminals no longer subject to prison time to protect the population but answerable to some weak intra iwi community service model that sees recidivism rates soar and more innocent often poor Maori further victimised? I got a glimpse of the future at Auckland Airport’s Air New Zealand Domestic Terminal. The next day there was a celebration at Parliament commemorating 50 years since the revival of the Maori language became official government policy and thousands of Maori school children descended on the Capital to take part. 80% of our flight were such children. Air New Zealand ground staff proudly and with great fanfare invited tangata whenua to board first and us Pakeha rabble last. I was stunned at this sign of corporate kowtowing to racial divisiveness. And don’t get me started on the current Air NZ safety video featuring dubious Maori mythologising and cringe inducing racial PC tropes. I’m sure I will be vilified in elite circles as pale, stale and male for expressing what still a majority of NZers feel.