Freedom of speech alive and kicking in Aotearoa

Media briefing
24th July 2009

Controversial immigration site voted ‘Best in New Zealand’

Freedom of speech alive and kicking in Aotearoa
 
On July 23rd presentations for the 2009 People’s Choice NetGuide Web Awards were made, recognising New Zealand’s favourite websites.

Many of the winners are household names such as Trademe, Seek and TelstraClear, but amongst the multi-million dollar corporations there was one site which stood out.

The controversial Move2NZ group, which recently called for government action on immigration issues, were last night applauded: voted New Zealand’s Best Community Website for the second year running.

“This is wonderful news, we’re really honoured” said Tammy Bell co-founder of move2nz.com. “The last few weeks have been incredibly stressful and this is just the lift Mike and I needed even though we couldn’t afford to get to Auckland to receive the award personally.”

Move2NZ recently attracted media attention to the desperate plight of skilled migrant families like the Kemps from Scotland and Schoenburgers from Germany.

“We have helped start positive action to fix these problems and avoid damage to New Zealand’s international reputation and economy.” Tammy Bell confirmed. “Unfortunately while helping these families we attracted attention from government too and found ourselves incorrectly accused of breaching the new Immigration Advisors Licensing laws.”

Starting the website from nothing by simply topping up their mortgage and doing all of the work themselves wasn’t enough for the Bells.

“Migrants are a great source of prosperity for this country and we saw the plans of far too many families coming to live in New Zealand fail because they had no support.” confirmed Mike Bell, architect of the site. “We knew we could do something about that.”

The Bells opened a completely free Migrant walk-in centre in 2006 using proceeds from this website and also presented Seminars in 2007 and 2008 providing what they call ‘proactive settlement support’.

Sadly the Bells recently had to close their unique centre after putting over 12,000 volunteer hours into helping more than 10,000 families with settlement support. They have also had to cancel their planned series of 19 presentations in the UK to protect themselves from legal action from the government.

“I couldn’t believe it when a notice was served on me warning of penalties of up to 7 years in prison without telling me what I had done wrong. It felt like I was being threatened simply for standing up and saying there was a problem.” said Mike Bell.

“This won’t stop us though as we are now planning on putting all of our energy into move2nz.com to make it even bigger and better.”

This win now confirms move2nz.com’s position as New Zealand’s favourite online community with just shy of 32,000 enthusiastic members and climbing.

“We have a fantastic community built up over the last 4 years and can’t thank them enough for their support.” confirmed Tammy Bell.

ends

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