Come to NZ – the nice stupid people will finance your home

Meet Sharissa Naidoo.

Sharissa Naidoo, 25, and her partner have been renting together for four years and say they are desperate to buy their first home.

"The concern is if we're wanting to start a family and move into a house that's more than one bedroom, we can't afford that," Naidoo says.

Naidoo recently graduated with a masters degree in sociology.

She is now sick of renting and expects the net taxpayer (you) to underwrite a home for her to live in with her "partner" (hate that word) of four years.

All of this, not even one year after her graduation ceremony in May 2012.

Can someone tell me why the net taxpayer already subsidises someone like this to go to university to do an absolutely uneconomic degree in the first place?

Least of all let them run up a student loan to take a job as a youth activist intern? Seriously, do you NEED a masters in sociology to do that job?

It does get worse with a simple Google.

A political activist like this from the left thinks they deserve to have all the things they saw others have when they grew up. They were sold a silly dream that to go to university and do a degree was the only thing they needed to do to have everything they ever wanted in life. Graduate and everything else lands on a plate for you.

Knowledge is power, education is the key ... all that garbage.

You can only imagine how this paper read:

Poor dear Sharissa. Her debt was not even accruing at a market rate at that point.

One year after graduation even those in professions have next to no money, and most people do not have parents generous enough to finance them into a home or business even if they can afford it. I didn't, and I didn't have any savings at all at age 25.

PwC junior pay was and, probably still is, appalling. Many people do not have a partner to live with to split costs and definitely most people live in a place far less opulent than the video footage of her current rental.

It gets worse.

If Sharissa is finding New Zealand a little too tough, perhaps she should pop back to South Africa after receiving her education at one of the best universities in the world and see what affordable housing looks like. A bit mean? I think not.

That is right, Sharissa seems to have only recently arrived in New Zealand. Six years ago as at 2012. That would be a couple of years tops in New Zealand's state education system and then the benefit of New Zealand's university system.

So after seven years and the grand sum of zero of those as a net taxpayer, she expects assistance to buy a house?

What country in the world does that for people who have only lived there for seven years and not one of those as a net taxpayer?

This should get the talkback fired up.

I have been in Hong Kong longer than Sharissa has been in New Zealand. Hong Kong people haven't worked, survived the British and the 1997 handover and paid their taxes to give immigrants like myself who choose to come here a cheap underwritten mortgage to buy a home. 

I pay more taxes than at least a third of the working population have in their lives by definition of the tax free threshold. 

Hong Kong housing is less affordable and a third the size than that of New Zealand. I do not expect the Hong Kong government to prioritise immigrants into "affordable housing", and neither do any immigrants who come here.

The more Sharissa Naidoo is thrown in front of the camera by the mainstream media the faster these silly buy-a-vote policies will go down the dunny with the middle-swing voters.

Cathy Odgers is a Hong Kong lawyer. She blogs as Cactus Kate.