11 August 2013
Two migrants to our battered islands.
One is an English bloke who had no special skills, but had an idea to start a company, based on a Pommy model. It was Chrisco, enabling its owner to fleece millions of dollars from people with few financial skills. And I do mean fleece, with Chrisco having been convicted of blatantly ripping its customers off.
In that case, the company was stealing from its customers, flouting the actual law. What isn't mentioned is the blatant rip-off the system is itself, with vastly inflated prices for lay-by goods. Using a supermarket Christmas Club account is 25 to 33% more productive than Chrisco, so the product can only be sold to people of extreme financial naiveté, lacking basic English, or generally being very, very gullible as to what the benefits actually are.
The owner, Richard Bradley, is a man I'd far rather had stayed and preyed on his native English. Thankfully, he has left our shores for Australia, but his monument to excessive profits and racketeering still stands, in the mansion currently occupied by Kim Dotcom.
The other migrant is a very pleasant young man who studied hard and gained sufficient qualifications to have a shot at living in New Zealand - in preference to his Sri Lankan homeland. He is the bloke you will see working away on a wet winter morning, starting his Saturday shift at 5 am. He picks up the rubbish that we proud Kiwis are too lazy to find a bin for.
I had a bit of a chat to him yesterday, standing in a drizzly Auckland morning. By 6:30 am he had a pile of 12 rubbish bags, collected from streets around our area, and remember, this is a decile 10, top-flight schools area, not behind Mangere town centre. The problem right here is exacerbated by hundreds of workers beavering away at about 500 new residences being built right now, but the scale of the litter is enormous.
This bloke's English is not too flash, but I love his attitude.
If having a bloke like him in our country doesn't make you proud to be a Kiwi, nothing will. He sees New Zealand as so preferable to his home nation that he'd rather clean up our filth than get a job in Sri Lanka.
Good on ya, mate!
(Seemed like a very smart young bloke, too. I have no idea what his name is, but if you're ever hiring and you meet a bloke whose job was picking up litter around the Mission Heights area, he's your man!)
Copyright © Alan Charman