To open or not to open (the borders)

By Rajitha Ratwatte

fromoutsidethepearl@gmail.com

As we all know there is increasing pressure to open borders and allow tourists in for the sake of the economy. This situation prevails here in Aotearoa – New Zealand as well as in the Pearl. Both countries have economies heavily dependent on foreign tourists and many entrepreneurs who are facing ruin at the hands of their banks and other lending institutions due to the current border restrictions. We have an interesting dilemma, don’t we? It seems written in stone that banks must be allowed to make profits regardless of who or what is affected. Why is that? Banks have made huge profits for so many years, can’t we consider telling the banks (to go to hell would be my words) to take a hit, reduce their profits, not actually make losses but reduce their margins drastically or even freeze the loans and other holds that they have on struggling businesses? I am told this is happening in some cases but too few and it needs to be formalized. 

Allow all tourism-based companies who are having difficulties, based on their tax returns and other documents that can be obtained from lending institutions, to have a ‘loan holiday’ for a period of 2 to 5 years. This means those companies can stop paying crippling interest on loans and finance payments on vehicles and the like. If and when matters return to normalcy, the outstanding amounts can be paid in agreed instalments. If some of the affected companies still cannot survive then the banks take the hit. After all, have you heard of a bank making a loss in the recent past? Why not? Most other businesses do make losses and have bad years!

Talking of ‘normalcy’, I read a rather scary book the other day. Fiction of course but it was called FEVER and published in 2017 by a South African author called Deon Meyer. It talks of a Corona based virus, purportedly spread by bats that sweep across the world. Being fictional and hopefully very far from the truth, this virus combined with various vaccine-resistant variants and the savagery of human nature kills most of the human population. It is later proved that this virus was created and spread by a group of elite scientists who have decided that global warming is going to destroy the world for the entire human race and have therefore taken matters into their own hands to apply Darwin’s ‘survival of the fittest’ rule in its most practical form. This fictional book also talks about many different vaccines being introduced that don’t really work. Now, this was based on research of the facts available in 2017. It proves one thing and that is that we should have been much more prepared for this virus. We have been too busy making money and destroying the world to take precautions against what could destroy us.

The book concludes with the fictional disclosure that these scientists who designed and released the virus have bases in a few Islands. They live on these Islands and survive the virus with the help of the genuine vaccine of course. Sri Lanka and New Zealand are two such islands in the book!

Do we really have to open the borders in such a hurry? Why can’t we find another way to run the country for a longer period. Two to five years more of being cautious and taking measures to safeguard us from possible future variants and such. The choice is between banks and entrepreneurs’, or am I being too simplistic? Sometimes simple is what it is all about, remember that old saying, Keep It Simple Stupid or KISS for short?

We had the second-year anniversary of the Christchurch massacre this week. That horrible day in March 2019, when a maniac went into two mosques and shot over 50 people. Of course, this has happened more frequently and on a much larger scale in the Pearl, but it was the first time (and hopefully the last time) for Aotearoa. Last year, no commemoration was possible due to Covid 19 being at its peak. So, this was the first real occasion to think and reflect on the terrible base instincts that govern the behaviour of us humans.

There were a great series of races for the Americas cup in our own Waitemata Harbour in this the city of sails – Auckland. Now, yours truly has no clue about this sport and watched the first few as it was on free to air TV and scheduled for when I was sipping my afternoon cup of tea. I found it most entertaining and rather exciting with the lead changing regularly and on one occasion mother nature taking over and the wind dropping completely for one boat and putting it in a seemingly hopeless position and then dropping for the other boat and allowing the seemingly hopelessly placed boat to win. This was better than the current Formula One motor racing if you ask me. Best of all, Aotearoa – New Zealand won the cup, retained it actually and the challenger was Italian and showed great spirit and charm. No America anywhere near the Americas Cup, how the mighty have fallen!

So, things are looking fair to middling for us on this Island situated in the nether regions of the globe. Covid under some sort of control and from a sporting point of view, Americas’ cup in the bag, scheduled to play in the final of the Test Cricket Championship in England later this year. Already runners up in the cricket and rugby world cups and our first-class rugby season underway and playing to full houses. The team of 5 million (total population of New Zealand) are punching above their weight. 

The Pearl has in some cases, done much better than this. We actually won the world cup of cricket 25 years ago and came second twice, but as a recent cartoon on the internet depicted, we once (around 30 years ago) had a minister of ports, who had been educated at Oxford—not a gold chain snatcher.