Defying gravity

They had strung the last of the Chinese lanterns - so they stretched all the way down K' Rd - by yesterday afternoon.Last year they put them up before Waitangi Day.I haven't checked out Queen St, but if the last few years are anything to go by there will be lanterns all the way down there as well. They will be up for a month - as long as the Christmas decorations. There are no Waitangi Day or Matariki decorations by the way.

It takes years of tense wrangling with the government and a quirk of coalition politics to get an indigenous flag to fly alongside the Crown's one - for just one day of the year - on Auckland's harbour bridge... and yet the CBD's main shopping streets will once again be festooned with Chinese lanterns for a month - without any fuss whatsoever. Why is that?

There can be no doubt that the growing Chinese population is the reason why the promotion of Chinese culture has become an important activity for government agencies and councils. Numbers = influence. Only 1,146 Chinese aged 50 years and over in the last year became residents? Seems more than that: every day there are many elderly Chinese - unable to converse in English and armed with Gold Cards - who ride the same bus as me into town - they would definitely be in that category. Are the entire demographic living between Kelston and Pt Chev and happen to be ardent public transport enthusiasts?
Dying to come here? They don't have to wait that long.
NZ Herald:

Parents can be sponsored to become permanent residents if they have half or more of their children living in New Zealand.

Immigration New Zealand defines a family's "centre of gravity" as "the number of their adult children lawfully and permanently in New Zealand being equal or greater than those in any single country".

Because of China's one-child policy, this means nearly every new resident from China will be able to sponsor his or her parents to live in New Zealand permanently.

Immigration expert Professor Paul Spoonley describes the New Zealand policy as being "China friendly, by default".

Immigration Minister Jonathan Coleman says there are no plans to change it.

We have a demographic time bomb of the "baby-boomer" cohort retiring en masse from this year, meaning the government's universal pension system will collapse without major reform in the next dozen years, and yet the immigration minister thinks that encouraging elderly immigrants without any savings of their own to come here - and after ten years collect the pension - is sustainable. Adding all these immigrants to the pension system causes it to be even more unsustainable, but because the only public figure saying it will be a race-baiting arch-conservative politician that no-one in their right mind would ever vote for - viz: Winston Peters - nothing will change. The fact is the extra pressure on pension payments caused by the government's policy will be a factor in why the retirees of this generation will be worse off than the ones fortunate enough to be retired now. It is hard to believe that the net affect of the younger immigrant's taxed income - especially in our low wage economy - will ever amount to more than what it costs to keep both their parents on a universal government pension and on the universal government health programme. The rationale of having them here in the first place is that they are supposed to help shoulder the burden of the pensions and health care of the already resident population, but how can they do that if they have to sustain their own parents too?

The entire concept is a pyramid scheme which demands ever increasing numbers of immigrants to fund the pensions, to keep the middle class' property values up and is the simple way to increase the raw GDP number (but not the per capita number) that impresses people from the OECD. In this respect the theory is it is irrelevant where the immigrants come from, though in practice the Crown agents target specific groups: last week it was Singapore, next week it may be the UK.
The political parties seek to engage - on their terms. The parties court the new immigrants and in doing so they become ever more reliant on them for votes and donations and therefore must represent their interests. Their interests include keeping the immigration rules as open as possible, they include official validation of their culture. In a situation where one immigrant can bring in their elderly parents and their partner and then in turn their partner's elderly parents the interests of the country - culturally and economically - are at odds with this current system.

The last Labour government (with a hypocritical and acquiescent Winston Peters silent on the issue) signed us up to a trade agreement with the People's Republic that included - at Beijing's insistence - a one-way migration clause for their nationals to come here. Beijing sponsors "Confucius Institutes" here too - and donations of Chinese material to our public libraries are now so routine that at the local branch the Chinese language section is now larger than the Te Reo section.

Even the ranting anti-PRC Whaleoil is not immune to the pervasive influence of Chinese culture and PRC funding - check out the awkward ad placements that arise when whoring out his blog:
The numbers: