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Tuesday, June 19, 2012

Settler society

stats.govt.nz:

Permanent and long-term migration by citizenship

In the June 2011 year, 60,200 PLT arrivals were non-New Zealand citizens. Another 23,800 were New Zealand citizens, most of whom were returning to New Zealand after having lived overseas for 12 months or more.
New Zealand-citizen departures numbered 53,700 in the June 2011 year, and non-New Zealand citizen departures numbered 26,400.

So the net total of NZ citizens leaving last year was 30,000 and the net arrival of non-NZ citizens was 34,000.  The NZ population is not growing - they are being replaced by foreigners.
The NZ government's immigration policy is that of mass migration. It always has been even if conditions prevailing at various times have prevented reaching the government's targets. Australian and European immigrants are referred to in the Treaty of Waitangi preamble as the reason for the British wanting to establish a government in the first place. NZ and the NZ government is both the cause and effect of the immigration policy.

This is a self-supporting structure in two main ways.

Firstly, the government needs the immigrants to increase the static property valuation (ie. houses and land) and stimulate business (ie. increase turnover and reduce wages through the external competition of migrants) of the Pakeha middle and upper classes that dominate the government in particular and society in general and they use the government as a tool to realise their material and social ascendency over others.  This is justified simply as "economics" without any further argument as if it is self-evidently a positive and desirable outcome. 

Secondly, the NZ government exists to suppress the rival Maori forms of governance that continue to possess the only continuous legitimate alternative to their rule. The land seized and rorted off Maori was the basis for the massive immigration surge in the 1870s that radically changed the population from majority Maori to majority Pakeha (thus rendering any democratic possibility of effectively challenging the militant settler regime from the inside as an impossibility) and the NZ government borrowed massive amounts in Europe using the confiscated land as security.   The NZ government changed the law to allow aliens to buy, sell and own land in the colony giving an incentive for foreigners to buy land resulting in increased prices as well as more migration. This gross government indebtedness, their suppression of Maori and their mass immigration policy has never changed.

The objectives of colonisation are thus still being pursued vigorously by this government as it surely will by the next. The question of whether the NZ government, or NZ society at large, has any degree of understanding or consciousness of this colonisation strategy is moot. They either accept it implicitly in an unreflective assertion that these things are a matter of fact and history (rather than a matter of policy and the future which presumes deliberation and exercising a choice) - meaning they see no injustice, see no cause for action and have no opinion; or they are aware of some of the injustices and some of the general tenets of the colonial project but believe that it somehow magically came to an end with the signing of some document with the British government (that no-one can say exactly what this was or when this happened) and that the NZ government is therefore fully competent to resolve all the hang-over issues through the "historical" settlements of the Waitangi process. This is the comforting, self-assured - indeed, smug - view of the vast majority of New Zealanders. There seems to be very few people who see the colonial project in its totality or realise that it is ongoing.

1 Comments:

At 19/6/12 1:38 pm, Blogger Shona said...

Thanks Tim. This aligns with my own long held view of how NZ was populated and colonised thru immigration. There wasn't a single paper available for study in Nz history when I was I fresh faced newbie student at Otago in 1974. NZ wasn't considered to have a history worth stuying at tertiary level,even tho' I'd been focussing on NZ history from School Cert. thru' to Bursary .

 

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