Party Vibe

I’ve known English people to be pulled up for 10-12 year old motoring offences and even sent to jail for non payment of fines/skipping bail…

NZ and AU have always been fairly strict on immigration (in spite of being countries where having a criminal record was once a requirement to end up there!); they also have centre-right governments which claim to be “tough on immigration but business friendly”. So many people get allowed in there because of money but the US feds have already taken the bulk of it from him.

That said, if the rules to enter a country say you must declare motoring offences for long term immigration visas (which is unusual) they are still the rules; you either comply to them or find another country to reside in. He also committed the offence within NZ whilst on a short term visa; lots of people worldwide are understandably concerned over foreigners who come to their country and break the laws and to be fair NZ is trying to sort out long standing national concerns over road safety (I had thought the motoring offence occured in a similarly named place in the USA).

It doesn’t make sense either that he declared two other more serious crimes (which had expired as Germany has a fairly tolerant attitude to giving people second chances!) but not the comparatively minor motoring offence (he did not after all get into a crash or drive badly on other occasions). Probably was a mistake but with immigration cases that can be viewed as simple contempt for your new countries laws; can’t help but wonder whether he would have made the same mistake if he was a different skin colour from the bulk of the population! I work with a lot of immigrants, my employers help them with their visas and how to behave positively in the UK and they are warned right from the start you have to behave yourselves in a new country and are constantly being watched and judged; and some things you might have got away with in other nations might not be tolerated as much here.

Also it appears he cannot be directly deported to USA for this incident, only Germany or Finland (his home countries).

@Requiem 596932 wrote:

Yeah it’s very strange though I think. I agree that the rules are the rules and this seems like a stupid thing to miss off his application especially after declaring his German convictions.

The fact it happened in NZ must mean NZ has a record of it which makes me wonder why it’s taken 5 years and how the hell it suddenly came to light now.

no different from my friends being pulled up for historical motoring offences in a different part of England they committed when youths when were then in their 30s because they came to notice of the constabulary in their new town due to being involved in drugs and squatting; every bit of interaction you have with any public authority worlwide can trigger various forms of cross checking.

he may also have only recently have applied for a permanent visa; NZ were probably hoping he was only planning to be a temporary immigrant and would eventually “fuck off back to where he came from”; especially as he has himself talked about handing himself in to US feds at some point! He is still an immigrant in NZ and unfortunately for him attitudes to immigrants have hardened worldwide.

According to his own words (as reported in the NZ Herald) NZ public opinion turned against him and he no longer feels safe or welcome in that country; and sadly this appears to date back from when he set up a political party which also supported the indigenous people (Maoris), I suspect folk thought he was “stirring the pot” and that caused the backlash.

NZ apparently prides itself on having “small government/low taxes” and is run by conservative sheep farmers. such countries often create an illusion of personal liberty by underinvestment in such things as linked databases for the public service; leading to situations like these. The UK isn’t a great deal better.

I managed to accidentally drop off the electoral register when I moved back to London in the 1990s (near where I was born) as the Council was on strike and a backlog of work (which included my form saying I’d moved areas) was simply dumped. As I was getting my bins collected and using the libraries and other public services and there wasn’t an election for a few years I didn’t realise anything was amiss; until I got nicked in London for a small amount of drugs in 1994 (by which time I’d moved back to my family house in SE England); cops had no record of me existing as a British citizen and my mum had to answer the door to the bobby at 6am and produce my passport to show I wasn’t an illegal immigrant!

The way the NZ govt fucked up the RC policy is exactly the sort of mistake a centre right government makes; as they want to squeeze the money out of the industry whilst not obviously “surrendering to drug users”. Even ours hasn’t been as stupid (to be fair the ACMD are only now actiing on evidence from the Police, Councils and NHS that an NPS is causing harm).

ACMD (or to be fair a lot of UK regulators such as Ofcom) really aren’t as daft as people make them out to be; they know that my generation and those following will simply ignore regulations they think are pointless and that the best they can do with regulations is reduce harm.

I do get the idea they are very subtly nudging people towards NPSs that are not bunk or ineffective but less likely to encourage redosing/psychological addiction whilst not looking too “soft” at the same time.

@Requiem 596942 wrote:

Yeah I’d agree with that. Seems quite bizarre with the conservatives in government when you look at the way they talk about them.

Even when Thatcho and Major in power there were forerunner organisations to ACMD (like the ISDD) pointing out that even if the govt wanted to get harsh there wasn’t enough capacity in the criminal justice system to nick every drugs user without them spending taxpayers money on the extra resources; especially as there would be an upsurge in other crimes and even widespread public disorder (its no coincidence that riots in the UK have often followed ill judged and heavy handed Police action against minority groups, often on suspicion that they might be involved with drugs).

They didn’t exactly rush to clamp down on the early 1990s rave boom with MDMA and other substances in spite of it introducing millions of youngsters to all sorts of drugs; it was the mid 90s that the Conservatives tried; and lost an election soon after, with the new Blair govt coming close to legalisation but suffering a backlash from middle England and then economic decline and war unfortunately hardened the politicians attitudes.

British governments have previous history of disbanding drugs watchdogs when they start saying prohibition is pointless, only to find the next one eventually comes to the same conclusion.

to be fair I don’t think any prospective politician worldwide could get away with saying they’d openly support decrim in front of what appears to be a load of 6th formers (most of whom would be below 18 years of age); the right wing press would crucify them.

Consider how President Obama who was open and honest about his own drug use had to back down due to a backlash from his own policy supporters.

Even the Greens have been quiet about their drugs policy (which is about the most sensible about the lot). I don’t even blame a Labour leader for being cagey about answering these questions pre-election as when they were last in power they did experiment with making the drug class C and it backfired badly.

He did hint though that whilst he didn’t agree with the young womans point of view he would at least listen to it (which is what the last Labour govt did, although anything positive they did in their last years got overshadowed by war and economic depression) – whereas the Conservatives don’t even listen to any pro-decrim argument (Theresa May has rejected those outright and also made qat/khat controlled when ACMD said that it should be left alone).