Frank Greenall: Deja vu ... all over again

HARD TIMES: Romans had housing shortages and rampant immigration to worry about ... kind of like Auckland.

HOUSING shortages and sky-high prices.

Uncontrolled immigration.

Traffic - time lost getting around the city.

Noise and chaos on the streets. Unsafe streets after dark. Litter and dirt. Unsafe buildings.

Sound familiar? Yes, along with contemporary Auckland, these were the main issues bugging Roman citizens over a couple of thousand years ago.

The poet Juvenal was especially brassed off ...

"Where in Rome is there a house for rent where you can get some sleep?" he asked. "Only people with their own big houses ever get any rest." (Must be a bit the same with 20 in the house at Manurewa)

And the relentless stream of immigrants forced up house prices to the extent that Rome's were four times that of the next highest district. The result - rampant speculation and a proliferation of apartment construction, often with sub-standard workmanship and materials. Here we go round the mulberry bush.

The rationale for Government policy on present immigration levels is interesting, given that it is currently at record levels of around 70,000 net increase per annum - equivalent to dumping the population of a city the size of Palmerston North on Auckland every year.

This rationale nearly always hinges on clichs like "growing the economy", "encouraging investment", and the like.

Yes, unbelievably, exacerbating already horrendous transport, housing and infrastructure issues is seen as "growing the economy". This all gets back to the myopic thinking that somehow manages to detach quality of life issues from "the economy" - conveniently ignoring the reality that quality of life is the very essence of "the economy".

What exactly is the point of ramping up traffic congestion, screwing a goodly proportion of the coming generation out of the prospect of home ownership in the place they grew up, and generally creating a socially dysfunctional brew of crime and predation - and then have the nerve to call it growing the economy?

Often the accompanying text is that we need to bring in the skills necessary to drive areas like the construction industry, but the claim that a lot of these so-called specialist jobs can only be filled by immigrants is specious. Many are low-to-medium skill jobs such as agricultural and builders' labourers, truck drivers, machinery operators and the like which could easily be supplied by existing Kiwi residents if we chose to take the trouble to train them ourselves.

With the aggregation of this degree of new migrants in Auckland, it has become a circular argument saying that we need the skills to build the infrastructure demand largely being created by the arrival of new immigrants in the first instance.

Resident Kiwis - often the most vulnerable - are being told devil takes the hindmost. "Growing the economy" translates into creating a rat's nest of social dysfunction problems related to scungy housing and entrenched low socio-economic areas that are the fuel to the fire of an already overburdened, incredibly expensive social welfare network.

The economy that's being grown seems only to apply to a certain sector of the market, with a critical chunk of the rest of it being thrown on the scrapheap.

If you allow that the country has to have some sort of immigration policy and not just open slather, the next question becomes: What is a level that that the country can reasonably handle without destroying the very qualities that attract immigrants in the first place?

It's a bit like limiting tourist helicoptering in wilderness areas because excessive and intrusive helicopter noise pollution trashes the whole point of it.

Much of the economy of Rome was predicated on legions of slaves attending to the needs and desires of an oligarchic minority. With many in Auckland working two or three jobs simply for the privilege of treading water trying to cover accommodation and utility costs, the next big demand is going to be for ever more circuses.