I’M replying to the letter published two weeks ago regarding ‘The Australian Nightmare’. This letter really did hit us with a big blow in the gut.
You see we are busy obtaining our visa (Skilles189) at the moment and have started even before Peter Dutton made the comment about fast tracking visas for white farmers.
My first encounter with crime was when my wife and I were hijacked. I finished my trade as a millwright and bought a brand new car with my second pay check. Two weeks later we were hijacked in front of our parents house.
I still remember telling the four armed men to please leave us alone and take what you want and ended up fighting for my wife’s life as they wanted to take her with them.
I also remember thinking “I studied for four hard years just to give a car to criminals” and the worse was the police treating us like we wanted to commit fraud while we were still traumatised by the event.
One year later, the insurance company asked me to identify my car, they took me to Stanger and at the back of a police man’s house with other cars, I later found out by the insurance agent that it was part of a syndicate. So I studied for four years to give a car to a corrupt policeman.
So we moved to Pinetown for new opportunities and rented a house, as a millwright I was working shifts and doing call outs then all hell came.
They broke into the house four times in six months, one time my wife locked up our three children and herself in the bathroom while they were cleaning out the house and as a man you are sitting 15km from the house at work on the phone trying to calm your wife down and end up getting there before the police. You may be thinking why not get security system with armed response – well if you have bad credit like more than 50 per cent of South Africans, they don’t help you, you are stuck with the police.
So we got a two-bedroom flat for security paying the same rent as we did for a four-bedroom house. We feel safe, till we leave the security boom. So I studied for four years to live with five occupants in a two-bedroom flat.
To get back to the house we moved into, I never met the owner only his sister. She said he was living in Pietermaritzburg and she conducts business for him in Pinetown but I did speak about payments and maintenance with him many times over the phone.
The day when we moved out, the one neighbour came to me and said “do you know whose house this is” and showed me an article on his phone and I was dealing with a convicted criminal in prison on telephone.
He was doing business like normal in prison living off my tax money getting rent on a house every month to do with I don’t know.
There are many other stories of being scanned and blackmailed by rental agents I can write to you but, for now Australia is our family’s best hope to get our lives going again and to stay alive.
Personally I think the post was propaganda, I looked up all the statements and could not find any truth to the statements that was made actually the opposite in positive feedback because South Africa is losing the bid in keeping good skilled artisans to build the economy, this includes farmers.
How much money will agriculture lose if half the farmers left?
I have seen almost over 20 millwrights leaving for Australia and New Zealand that I have worked with in my 12-year career. (I have only worked for two companies in my life).
So for now my family is living on bread and Marmite so we can save up R160 000 in 12 months to get our permanent residency visa.
I had to pay R19 000 to redo my trade test at an international training centre in Cape Town due to Australia not trusting corruption in South Africa, I even had to certify all paperwork at a lawyer as Australia doesn’t trust our SAPS.
Our country is going down slowly, that’s why I’m going down under.
Quentin Fourie
Northdene
ED: Letter has been shortened
