Letters: Employers pay minimal wages

Once upon a time, working-class Kiwis could afford to pay a mortgage and raise a family, a reader says,

Jackie Evans (Letters, February 14) believes that New Zealanders are lazy, so we need immigrants to run our rest homes and, pick our fruit and plant our trees.

Who does she think did these jobs before our government green-lighted industrial-scale immigration for the benefit of rich employers?

New Zealanders are not lazy - we descend from people who crossed from the other side of the planet and turned a pair of islands into a peaceful, prosperous, democratic nation.

The problem is that rich New Zealand employers like to pay wages that their employees can not possibly live on. And they expect the government to give money to their employees so they can scrape by from week to week.

Once upon a time, working-class Kiwis could afford to pay a mortgage and raise a family - even on one income. But thanks to Roger Douglas, Ruth Richardson and a Labour Party more interested in trendy causes than the plight of working-class New Zealanders, those days are but a distant memory.

Employers, in my view, love the limitless supply of cheap Third World labour; this is one of the reasons New Zealand is a low-wage economy. Even the Treasury - that bastion of free-market twaddle - has publically stated that immigration is driving down wages for New Zealanders at the bottom of the heap.

There are no economic benefits to New Zealanders arising from the immigration regime foisted upon us by the neo-liberals.

CC McDowall
Rotorua

Rubbish dumping

Tracey McLeod (Letters, February 14) continues to advance what I have previously described as a simplistic answer to our illegal rubbish dumping problem. She proposes hiding battery-powered sleuth cameras in trees.

McLeod should, as I also suggested to her, read the problem that our council faces, which is "Council is required under the privacy statutes to disclose that a site is monitored and evidence gathered might be used for prosecution. So council cannot stealthily monitor the activities of people" to quote from their website.

And Paul Carpenter calls me to question over council debt. He claims that one day we will all have to pay back our council's debt, which is wrong, and asks if I would run my own home the same as council does financially.

The answer is no, a household exists for a finite period of time and it cannot carry over its debt. In contrast, our Government and all of our councils use public debt that is never paid down. Would that I could do the same.

And Carpenter does not acknowledge the point of my original letter. He continues to scare us with talk of millions. My letter pointed out that the Lakefront will not cost me individually $20 million, it will cost me $10.50 for 10 years. Why can he not acknowledge this and suggest that we should all examine our individual circumstances to see just what the cost is in reality? (Abridged)

John Pakes
Ngongotaha

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