Garth George: Far too much immigration without preparation

I don't particularly like walking down Queen St in central Auckland (there are five Queen Sts in the metropolitan area) and wondering whether I might be in Beijing, Hong Kong, Seoul, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore or Taipei.

I don't particularly care for Indian food (I loathe curry) - or Chinese or Malaysian or Korean or Vietnamese for that matter. Those are tastes and textures I can well live without.

I get a bit grumpy when the nose-to-tail "rush hour" on the Northwestern Motorway extends to three hours and it takes me longer and longer to get home from work.

(But I'm grateful every day that I don't live anywhere that requires me to use the Southern Motorway, for I decided years ago that I would never live in any part of Auckland that required me regularly to use that or the Northern.)

I cringe when I look at the horrid clumps of high-density housing that have sprung up all over West Auckland - as they have in nearly every other part of the city - many of them jerry-built and destined to be tomorrow's grotty slums.

I suppose I've got used to seeing a foreign face behind the counter of every dairy, corner store and home bakery and have learned to listen very carefully to any conversation that might be required in making a purchase.

These are all things I could well do without, all things brought upon me mainly by brainless policies of immigration without preparation.

So when people like Winston Peters and his sidekick Peter Brown make noises about there being far too many immigrants arriving far too quickly I tend to mutter "Hear! Hear!"

Already there will be readers choking on their cornflakes or spluttering in their coffee as they snort "racist!" Well, splutter on. I'm just as entitled to my racial preferences as I am to my preferences in clothes, cars or food.

We toss words such as "racism" and "prejudice" and "discrimination" and "judgmentalism" and "rights" these days at anybody and everybody who expresses a view that runs contrary to the accepted politically correct line.

The reason we do that is it means we don't have to think. That's what political correctness is all about - giving the populace a set formula to believe in so they don't have to think for themselves.

And that means we can be manipulated and conditioned and used by those who set and defend the rules, a self-styled elite of ivory tower academics and power-hungry politicians with a penchant for social engineering, and the corps of frontline enforcers they employ, known as commissioners.

(It's a bit frightening, isn't it, how the two cohorts of the elite have come together in this Labour Administration?)

We fall for all this easily because thinking takes a bit of effort and if it's thinking about oneself and what one is and what one believes, it can be scary and quite often painful.

Jesus Christ said: "As a man thinks, so he is." Four hundred years earlier, the Greek philosopher Socrates proposed that "The unexamined life is not worth living". They were both right - and are just as right today as they were when they lived. We are what we think.

In his criticism of immigration policy, Mr Brown's use of the notorious words of the late Enoch Powell was probably unwise. But what made me sick was the reaction of Helen Clark, echoed by an editorial in this newspaper, pointing to the economic benefits immigration had brought to Britain.

Is that where we've come to? Is the only thing that matters in what we do or don't do, that it will put more money in our pockets? Have we reduced the sum of our lives to dollars and cents?

Sadly so, I fear. We are pulling in immigrants by the tens of thousands because allegedly they will add to our wealth. It seems that it doesn't matter where they come from or how alien they might be to our way of life - as long as they've got money they're welcome.

No one seems even slightly interested in the social, health, welfare, educational and infrastructural problems this vast influx of such people has already wrought.

And anyone who tries to raise these issues is labelled racist. Well, I don't give a damn who wants to pin that label on me, I'm persuaded that this ill-considered immigration policy is doing us more harm than good.

Its all very well to talk about "diversity" (another of those politically correct bullshit words that can mean anything) but no one seems to be concerned about the things that really matter, such as overcrowded schools, teacher shortages, overflowing hospitals with interminable waiting lists, near-gridlocked roads and house prices that make the Kiwi dream a fantasy.

There are numerous very good reasons to question our immigration policy as it stands and we are fortunate that at least a couple of politicians and some media people still have the courage to continue to question it on behalf of hundreds of thousands of increasingly uncomfortable New Zealanders.

Writing these folk off as "racist" is a coward's defence. But then name-callers always have been.

* Email Garth George

Feature: Immigration