"Ditch the winter chill” and “expand your horizons in sunny South East Queensland!” reads one newspaper advert, luring New Zealand’s health-care workers towards a new life in Australia. “Warmer days and higher pays”, enthused another, last year, from the Australian state’s police service. Kiwis who chose “policing in paradise” could look forward to 300 days of annual sunshine and a A$20,000 ($12,500) relocation bonus, it declared.

For many New Zealanders that is an easy sell. They are leaving their country in record numbers. Almost 129,000 residents emigrated last year—40% above the pre-pandemic average for this century. It is not a case of last in, first out. The majority of those leaving were New Zealanders, rather than immigrants returning home, creating a net loss of 47,000 citizens.

New Zealand, though a settler country, is also shaped by emigration. Its small economy and relative lack of opportunity have long driven young New Zealanders towards what they call the “overseas experience”, fanning fears of brain drain. Proportionate to its population of 5.3m, it has one of the largest diasporas in the OECD, a club of mostly rich countries. Emigration ebbs and flows: the last spike occurred in 2012, near the end of the financial crisis. As the pandemic raged, many expats returned to hunker behind closed borders, but the outflow quickly resumed. Recently, New Zealand has been in a rut. The economy is in recession and unemployment has risen. Outgoing Kiwis grumble about costly housing and a crime surge.

Unlike most, they have an alternative when times get tough: they are free to live and work in Australia, and vice versa. Almost 15% of them are now based “across the ditch”. It is not just that Australia’s economy has weathered the cost-of-living crisis better. The income gap between the pair has been growing for decades. Adjusted for purchasing power, Australia’s per person GDP is about a third higher than New Zealand’s. Its pensions are more generous, and its centre-left Labor government has made it easier for Kiwis to get passports and benefits. By comparison, New Zealand is “a sinking boat”, says one transplant on a Facebook group for Kiwi expats. Australia is “best for [an] easy life”, writes another.

In the past, fears of brain drain have proved overblown. Young expats have generally returned, and governments have offset losses by letting in immigrants from countries such as India and China. The result was a “brain exchange”, says Paul Spoonley, a sociologist at New Zealand’s Massey University. But there is a risk of that changing, he argues. First, he says, it is no longer just young New Zealanders who are leaving, but more experienced professionals and extended families. Second, inward immigration is now slowing. After a post-pandemic spike, it plunged by around a third last year, though the population is still growing. Christopher Luxon, the prime minister, says the solution is “to build a long-term proposition where New Zealanders actually choose to stay”. But that has not proved easy. In 2009 John Key, then prime minister, set out to “match Australia by 2025”. In Wellington, the capital, some now joke that a more realistic goal would be to “beat Fiji by 2050”.

    • Yeather@lemmy.ca
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      4 days ago

      That means the country had high immigration from the host country. Colonies like the original 13 US colonies, Canada, and New Zealand are where settlers would go to try and have a better life. This is unlike other colonies for resource extraction, or unique ones like the prison colony of Australia.

      • BikerChiwi@mastodon.nz
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        4 days ago

        @yeather hmm arguably a bigger proportion of Australia’s current proportion migrated well after the penal colony settlers.

        Logically every country is a settler country in that waves of human migration brought people to those lands.

        It’s a pretty tenuous way to describe a country.

        • liv@lemmy.nz
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          4 days ago

          It’s not an unusual word use.

          Historically, settler colonialism was the systematic resettling of large swathes of people, resulting in countries where the bulk of the population is descended from relatively recent migrants - “settler societies”. Additionally, about a quarter of Australians and New Zealanders are first generation immigrants.

            • liv@lemmy.nz
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              1 day ago

              @BikerChiwi@mastodon.nz it carries a lot of history. I think to call a settler country a “migrant country” would be to deliberately ignore the cultural and political dominance of the settler group over the Indigenous people and other migrants.

              • BikerChiwi@mastodon.nz
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                1 day ago

                @liv Yes and in the same vein I would not use the term ex-colony to describe us even though we are one. We are charting a different path and labels that tie us to the past are counterproductive. Ymmv.

        • Yeather@lemmy.ca
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          4 days ago

          Wikipedia considers New Caledonia, Western New Guinea, the Andaman Islands, Argentina, Australia, British Kenya, the Canary Islands, Fiji, French Algeria, Generalplan Ost, Hawaii, Hokkaido, Ireland, Israel/Palestine, Italian Libya and East Africa, Kashmir, Korea and Manchukuo, Latin America, Liberia, New Zealand, northern Afghanistan, North America, Posen and West Prussia and German South West Africa, Rhodesia, Sápmi, South Africa, South Vietnam, and Taiwan to be settler regions and countries. So Australia would be in the same boat as New Zealand, maybe there’s some context missing since I am not from New Zealand and looking at this from Western Europe.

          • liv@lemmy.nz
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            4 days ago

            Wikipedia is being slightly odd. In standard use a settler society is one in which the dominant group (usually the majority) are there as a result of settler colonialism. Places like Kenya and SA by contrast got out from under settler rule and are post-independant.