"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”.
The problem is that NZ is too conservative of a nation to think outside the box of extractive industries and tourism. For a little while there people were trying to build a tech industry but that seems to have fizzled out.
We desperately need stop thinking about packing plant and animal matter into shipping containers and trying to sell them overseas. Bits are much easier and cheaper to ship. We need to shift our economy to one based on intellectual property ASAP or we are going to continue to suffer from deprivation.
I re-immigrated after 15 years away shortly after COVID. Why the fuck I chose NZ and not Australia is beyond me.
Sure, compared to London, It’s very nice here. To my knowledge nobody has been mugged, raped, stabbed, murdered or any combination of in any local parks. Unlike the near weekly occurrence in London. Schools don’t have 10ft fences around them and metal detectors. 45mins in a car gets you somewhere interesting.
But it’s cold, the houses aren’t built for the weather and they’re (along with everything else) expensive; the pay is bad, and even if the pay was better the workplaces are petty and unproductive, not that there’s many opportunities;
Maybe Oz would have been a better choice? But equally, could just be a “grass is greener” situation.
@fallaciousreasoning
“though a settler country” wait, what?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.
@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.
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 I think the term settler carries a lot of baggage - much more than migrant. But maybe that’s just me.
@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.
@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.
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.
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.
Wow, and I nearly moved to NZ to escape the hell that is USA. I only stayed because I landed in a relationship unexpectedly (there was much contention as I debated whether to stay or go once the orange-bad was elected again). This makes me think I could take my tech skills there even more easily, come to think of it.
Look, as an Aussie who first visited a year ago to NZ, I was smitten. I seriously considered moving to NZ. But my God, the cost of everything is so expensive. How are you all living and surviving there?!
In Wellington, the capital
