New Immigration rules!! darn!

There is a new immigration rules announced which will affect anyone who get work permit after 30 Nov. (I saw this on newspaper) For those who can't earn more than 33700 per annum, the children have to pay international fee (Primary and secondary education included) instead of free education. This will increase the risk of new immigrants as they may want to start low in wages for the first job.

By the way, did I mention .NET developers and Microsoft experts have more job opportunities here? Many large banks use SQL instead of Oracle. Most Oracle DB job I saw are in Wellington (governments). Of course, there are always exception but so far, if I remember it correctly, I never see an Auckland Oracle database job before... Microsoft infra technology such as Exchange, ISA, AD are even more dominant in this area. Java is slightly less demand than .NET but it is still good enough.

House price is increasing after 1 year of slumping, houses are sold like hot cakes (this may explain why so many house agents own wonderful ships for weekend relaxganza). By 400k, you can get quite a nice landed house in a good area. 500k can be in high-end area already, but you will work your socks off to the bank here for sure... However, I don't think we can get a landed house in KL for 500k (dollars to dollars). Wages here is more than Malaysia. A Linux engineer can earn 5k per month (but tax is higher than KL, for my tax bracket is average 21% vs 30% here). Interest rate is about 6% in Malaysia, NZ is about 6.5% - 9%!!! (when economy is good, interest could be crazy to fight inflation)