Hey all, I hope I’m posting to the right place. My gf and I are both trans women considering immigrating to New Zealand from the US. We both have green list careers so we’re not too worried about eligibility but we are wondering if we would be welcome/fit in in NZ.
Everything I’ve seen or heard in media makes NZ look about 1000 times better than the US. Every country has their problems but from my limited viewpoint NZ looks pretty great. We’d appreciate any advice or perspective you’d care to share. Thanks in advance.
This is a pretty hard one to answer. I’m not convinced there are many places in the world you can be openly non-cis and not ever feel like you’re not welcome. Our latest election also swung our government pretty hard to the right, because we are not immune from the same things that affect the US and other countries. Luckily a proportional government means single parties almost never get over 50% of the vote so they are forced to make agreements with other parties and so extremist policies end up watered down.
It’s also worth noting that NZ (the government and others) spend a lot of money on presenting a certain image of NZ to the world. You will find many people complaining about life in NZ, though you’ll find much less complaining from people who have lived elsewhere.
With that said, I feel NZ is pretty trans friendly overall. For example, for NZ passports we let people select the sex they want, even if different from other documents, simply by signing a form (the term “sex” is used because of international passport requirements).
I would aim for a big city (by NZ standards), I know Wellington is pretty friendly to non-cis, in part because the government is based there and there are a significant number of government employees working at agencies with diversity policies (you might see this phrased as “bring your whole self to work”).
I think you can say overall NZ is similar to other “western” nations (e.g. the UK or Australia), but with lower salaries, higher cost of living, and a better work life balance (for many but not all).
How bad at the rural areas? We want to live in a larger city anyways but we both lobe hiking and camping so would like to be able to at least visit the countryside.
Could you expound on work life balance? What kind of vacation time is considered average? Here we get 2-3 weeks a year.
If you’re living in a rural area, they tend to be very blue (national) for financial policy reasons, but from what I’ve seen are reasonably accepting of different sexualities etc.
As far as tourist areas are concerned, I don’t think they will be significantly different from urban areas, there’s not really a link between political views and being into the outdoors.
Oh I don’t want to give the wrong idea, it’s not like stories I’ve heard of the US. You’re very unlikely to get attacked for not being cis or straight in rural areas, just more like comments or stares. Maybe someone else can chime in though as I’m a cis straight white male so often these kinds of things are hidden from me.
Flexible working hours are common, many places are doing work from home for a portion of your time but the new government has come down hard on this recently for public service (which is a lot of Wellington workers). You can ask to have it in your contract though, and many places still will.
Legally annual leave is 4 weeks plus 11 public holidays (special rules if you need to work on those days, most office jobs will just shut for the day). Then you also get 10 sick days on top of this.
That all sounds a lot better than it is here, we’ve both experienced verbal harassment and I was attacked a couple years ago. I think I’d also feel more comfortable since yall have actual gun control laws, I grew up rural and have been around guns my whole life, but it is absolutly insane how prevalent they are here.
The work life balances sounds a lot better than what we have. We don’t have any minimum time off laws at all, and the current government wants to get rid of overtime pay and union protections.
Was just thinking, I’ve said flexible working hours are common, but this is going to be quite industry specific. Most of my recent experience is in public service which tends to be more flexible, but it’s not uncommon in other large organisations for non-customer facing office roles (i.e. those that don’t have specific customer hours).
Also, some of our government wants to remove union protections as well. The big difference is that our current government is made up of a coalition of centre-right party, a further right party, and a populist party. To pass laws, they all have to agree. So there’s a lot of talk, but in general changes are limited to rolling back some recent worker rights policies from the previous government, they can’t get enough agreement to pass sweeping changes. There is no such thing as president’s orders here, no one person can make a new law (apparently this is true in the US too but I don’t really understand what all the orders were Trump was signing).
That sounds a lot more sane than our politics, out policies change rapidly whenever the parties switch who’s in charge. The whole presidential executive orders thing is really wild, they can’t pass full laws but the power they do weild is immense. The 00s invasion of Iraq was done on an executive order, and no Trump is using them to take away lgbt rights and deport a ton of immigrants. The president is supposed to be reigned in by congress and the judicial branch but they’re both strongly aligned with same party and do little to check his power.
Legal minimum is 4 weeks paid leave, which accrues (ie, if you don’t use it, you keep it for next year) and 2 weeks sick leave (which doesn’t accrue)
Don’t forget to add the public holidays as well, i’ve found lots of folks overseas are surprised we get so many on top of our 4 weeks.
I think at last count there’s another 11 public holidays that you will also get, as well as the 4 weeks/20 days annual leave.
The employer can require you to work on the public holidays, but you will get paid 1.5x and a day in lieu (ie you take the public holiday at another date). Employers can also have a mandatory annual close-down, which is very common in bigger companies and organisations, will usually happen over Christmas & New Years and at that point they can require you to use up some of your 4 weeks.
I guess the other thing about leave which might be different in NZ compared to elsewhere is that especially if you have a bigger employer they’ll actively push you to take leave - pretty commonly they aim for you to have no more than 10 days annual leave owing, or at least plans to reduce it to get to that cap. That can be awkward but its also good that you get to take your leave!
This is the part that I think is kinda genius (although I doubt it was totally intentional) - by making leave accrue and requiring businesses to pay out the value when employees leave, you put a clear dollar value on doing the right thing. You align the employer and the employees interests, so even if a company can’t ensure people take leave because it’s the right thing to do, they can usually manage it because it’s good business
Agree with this, I think the point about living in a big city is important, and particularly Wellington is known to be more non-cis friendly compare with other cities.