New Zealand: Heading across the ditch

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1:23New Zealand, as most people will know, is at the far end of the world. So young New Zealanders have always gone overseas. It's long been a rite of passage for many young New Zealanders to head overseas once they finish their education. But now it seems young professionals and graduates are leaving the country in record numbers, sparking fears of a brain drain. More than half of those departing Kiwis are heading to Australia across the Tasman Sea, known colloquially as the Detch. At the moment, everybody knows someone moving to Australia. Especially in the last year, it's massive. People are actually talking about the fact that people are talking about moving to Australia.

2:09I think we're at the point where we should probably be talking about brain drain. We're seeing some of our best and brightest leaving to go and work in other countries. It's a massive thing to uproot and leave the place that you're most familiar with to come to somewhere which is an unknown, even if it is three hours across the ditch on a plane. I'm Ruth Evans, and in this BBC World Service documentary, Heading Across the Ditch, I'll be finding out what's driving this Kiwi exodus and what the country's rapidly changing demographics mean for the country's future. Through 2023 and 2024, we've seen the rise and rise of New Zealanders exiting this country.

2:51Paul Spoonley, an Emeritus Professor at Massey University in Auckland. So at one point recently, for a 12-month period, there were 80 ,000 New Zealand citizens that left to live in another country. New Zealanders, particularly younger New Zealanders, are looking around the world and thinking, can I get a decent job, a better salary, are there things that I want to do in another country? According to the government body Statistics New Zealand, 70 ,000 New Zealanders left in the year to March 2025 and there were 25 ,000 migrant arrivals, so a net migration loss of almost 45 ,000 people. This might not sound like a huge number to anyone listening in say India or Nigeria, but New Zealand has a small population of just over 5 million.

3:41So this exodus is having a big impact, especially given most people leaving are young New Zealanders aged between 18 and 30. Bryce Wilkinson is a senior fellow at the New Zealand Initiative, a Wellington-based think tank. So does he think there's a Kiwi brain drain? Young New Zealanders have always gone overseas after they've graduated or were in their early 20s. It's called doing your OE. Overseas experience. Yes, overseas experience. And during the COVID lockdown period, you couldn't do that. So there was a bit of a bounce back effect. So the recent outflows have been large, but not out of proportion when the economy is going through a hard time.

4:26New Zealand's economy suffered badly as a result of the pandemic, with high interest rates and unemployment. The Conservative coalition government's austerity measures aimed at reducing debt and job cuts in the public sector have been a push factor for record numbers of Kiwis leaving, says Brad Olson. As principal economist at the consultancy firm Infometrics in the capital Wellington, he's been crunching the numbers to understand what these trends might mean for the country.

4:58Ruth Evans:We don't have as much data as we'd like in terms of departure cards. We don't have them. We don't ask who's leaving, why they're leaving, when they might come back, what skills they're taking with them. We know that a lot of New Zealanders at a younger age go out for their overseas experience, their OE. It's a very classic New Zealand pastime. Travel around Europe, do a bit of work, earn some money and then eventually come back. What's interesting though when we've dug into the numbers, it is very heavily skewed at the moment. more people going across to Australia. The New Zealand unemployment rate is currently sitting at 5.1%, so a lot more people out of work.

5:34Ruth Evans:In Australia, the unemployment rate is sitting only just above 4%. So relatively speaking, if you're a New Zealander, you look at the numbers, you go, maybe it isn't easy in Australia, but it's easier to find a job than it is here in New Zealand.

5:52I've come now to Australia, and this is Melbourne's high-rise harbour front with its lively restaurants and bars overlooking yachts bobbing on the water. And I'm here to meet a young Kiwi who headed across the ditch two years ago.

6:06Ruth Evans:My name's Ben McGrath, I'm 28 and live in Melbourne. I moved in January of 23. Ben, where are you from originally? I was brought and raised in Timaru, which is a small town of 30 ,000 two hours south of Christchurch. And what brought you here? So I just finished my apprenticeship as a boilermaker in Christchurch and I had some friends from the previous company that I worked for that had moved to Australia and I learned about what they were making money-wise and decided that was much better here. So that was the initial reason for the move to Australia. So it was a financial decision to come because the New Zealand economy hasn't been doing so well in the last few years, has it?

6:47Ruth Evans:Yeah, that's right. The cost of living is soothed and it's actually got worse even since I've been here. But the income, particularly for trades in Australia, is significantly higher than New Zealand. Can you give me an idea of the differential in what you can earn here as opposed to back home? Yes, my income when I moved from New Zealand to Australia tripled. Tripled? Yeah, tripled. So that's a big incentive to come. It absolutely is. Ben's been doing well for himself, rising rapidly up the management ladder of the engineering company he works for, buying a flat overlooking Melbourne harbour and learning to sail in his own boat in his spare time.

7:26Ruth Evans:The lifestyle here is what's changed my mind on going back to New Zealand. For the foreseeable future I'll definitely be in Australia. I'd love it here. But if New Zealand's ailing economy is a push factor for young Kiwis like Ben, there are strong pull factors too. Explore the rewards of living and working in Western Australia as a teacher. Includes relocation support, financial incentives and visa sponsorship options. Teach where your spirit calls you. Australian employers and sectors are actively advertising in New Zealand and so you will see media stories around teachers or police or healthcare workers.

8:07Generous sign-on bonuses are often part of the package, says Professor Paul Spoonley. They're offering a higher salary and they're often offering relocation costs. They're raiding, particularly New Zealand's professional sectors, and looking to attract and recruit from the side of the Tasman. Raiding is quite a strong word to be using, so do you think that New Zealand is really losing out in this instance? Absolutely. And what's interesting about the people that are leaving in the last two years is that we're seeing the traditional pattern of a 20-something moving overseas, particularly to Australia, and quite often they're tertiary qualified.

8:53But more recently, we've seen people in their 30s who are moving, and they are typically people who've had work experience in New Zealand. They are not a new entrance to the labour market, and they're beginning to move to Australia. And of course for them it's an easy win because they've got people that are culturally and linguistically similar. They've got systems of education and training which are similar and so they get a finished product operating in a system over there, an organisation or a sector, which the person is absolutely prepared to work immediately in Australia. There's no period of language acquisition or adjustment, so it's a very easy win for Australia.

9:39In 2023, Australia also made it easier for migrating Kiwis to become Australian citizens, allowing them to apply after four years of residency and giving them access to social services and other benefits. Brad Olson says this easing of entry requirements has also had an effect.

9:59Ruth Evans:Australia has opened up the citizenship pathway for New Zealanders. And at the time, there was quite a lot of discussion here in New Zealand about, well, what will that mean for the trans-Tasman migration gap? Will it drive it stronger? And I think what we've actually seen is not necessarily that that change has meant more people have moved across, but it does limit just how many people might eventually move back. They already get a lot more of the resources and support that Australian citizens do. At the moment, everybody knows someone moving to Australia. People are actually talking about the fact that people are talking about moving to Australia.

10:36It's huge at the moment. JJ Smith has lived and worked in Australia several times, although the pull of family has now brought her back to Auckland. For the last 16 years, she's been running an information website for Kiwis thinking about heading across the ditch to Australia. I have information on as many different subjects as I can possibly get in regards to what New Zealanders would want to know moving to Australia. A lot of information on the direct pathway. It used to be Australia visa, but now it's the direct pathway. When that came in, that also caused a massive spike. A lot on just all the steps on moving.

11:19So moving companies, finding a job, opening a bank account, foreign exchange, health care, Medicare, moving your pets, everything. One pet, Mittens the cat, made international headlines earlier this year, flying freight to Melbourne to begin a new life with her owners. Unfortunately, the baggage handlers forgot to offload her and she was on the return flight to Christchurch before anyone realised. It took three cross-Tasman flights totalling more than 7 ,000 kilometres before the frequent flyer feline was finally reunited with her family. Fortunately, for most humans, the transition across the ditch isn't quite so traumatic, but it can still be challenging.

12:07It's a massive thing to uproot and leave the place that you're most familiar with to come to somewhere which is an unknown, even if it is three hours across the ditch on a plane, it's still a big job making it happen in reality. Rebecca Cookson is another Kiwi that's crossed the ditch. Her great passion in life when she's not working as a teacher at a distance education school in Sydney is flamenco dancing. I was born in Blenheim, which is a small town in the top of the South Island, and then it was actually flamenco dancing of all things that made me move to Christchurch and after the earthquakes of course the work dried up.

12:50I couldn't get any more relief teaching in the high schools there. It was hopeless, it was very stressful and worrying. Thousands of people left Christchurch after the earthquakes and I decided to move to Auckland. But after a few years living in Auckland, she decided to move to Australia. The reasons I came here were job opportunities. I just could not get ahead in New Zealand. There just aren't enough jobs there and the pay rates, as I now know, are abysmal in comparison to what is available in Sydney at least. I am able to earn quite a lot more than anything I could have even dreamt of getting in New Zealand.

13:27But she hasn't found the transition an easy one. It was a huge job, an administrative nightmare to get to Sydney by myself. And I didn't know where I was going to live. It was really tough, very, very stressful getting into a rental. That was another thing I discovered when I arrived in Sydney. There was a huge housing crisis here, far worse than in New Zealand even. Despite such challenges, there are a growing number of Kiwis like Rebecca and Ben choosing to up sticks for Australia. and this is happening at a time when immigration to New Zealand has also been at an all-time high, peaking at a quarter of a million migrants in 2023 and according to Statistics New Zealand, with 150 ,000 new arrivals in the year to March 2025.

14:16Simon Laurent is an immigration lawyer and chairman of the New Zealand Association for Migration and Investment. The biggest cohorts are from India and from China. We get a lot of people from the Philippines as well. You get a lot of people from India, for example, coming over to work construction, hospitality, hotel management and restaurants, the care workforce. The Philippines is a prime source. IT is important because there's always a shortage of qualified or experienced people in the ICT and communications. In New Zealand, it's always been this way and we never seem to fill the gaps. There's a lot from China who actually come in to fill those gaps.

14:58New Zealand, like Australia, operates a strict point system for immigration and there's relatively little illegal migration. Most new arrivals come under the skilled migrant category and according to Simon Laurent, New Zealand benefits from a brain gain that largely offsets the brain drain of people leaving. But this inflow creates other challenges, he says. That is placing a huge amount of pressure on the housing stock. There's a shortage of housing which has not been really remedied, is resulting in homelessness in this country because owing to the shortages, the prices for rent and for purchasing houses have shot up through the roof.

15:42But also the infrastructure is groaning under the weight of people, particularly moving to the main centres like Auckland, where a lot of the jobs are for migrant workers. The government acknowledges that New Zealand's house prices are among the most expensive in the developed world and is committed to freeing up land for development and removing unnecessary planning barriers, improving infrastructure funding and financing to support urban growth. But in the meantime, major cities like Auckland have been feeling the pressure. Auckland is New Zealand's largest city with a population of 1.7 million people.

16:20That's around a third of the country's total population. It was also recently ranked the fourth most diverse city in the world. 43 % of Aucklanders were born in another country. This Uber driver, for example, comes from mainland China. Have you lived in Auckland a long time? 13 years. 13 years? Yeah. And originally from China? North of China. Do you like it here? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't like the life too fast. Yeah, I like slow. Yeah. You're listening to the BBC World Service documentary, Heading Across the Ditch.

17:23And that's with Kyle Smith-Bino joining us. And then we'll be learning about Francis Galton and the racist, discredited pseudoscience of eugenics with Desiree Birch. We'll meet many medieval saints in their bone boxes with Rachel Parrott. So if that sounds like your sort of thing, listen to You're Dead to Me wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you. Bye.

17:47New Zealand is one of the classic immigrant receiving countries alongside Australia and Canada. We've always seen immigration as being something that contributes both economically but also socially to the country. I'm the son of British migrants. In 2025, my migrant parents would be most likely to come from India, the Philippines and China, which are our top three immigrant source countries. and people generally don't see immigration as a problem in the way that, for example, much of Europe sees immigration as a problem. One of the weird dynamics is that we still get immigrants who are coming to escape the cultural diversity of the UK and sometimes they might come from places like South Africa and they're coming to New Zealand thinking it'll be a very English country.

18:38You do get some of that migration to avoid cultural diversity and of course they get a bit of a shock once they get here. Wayne Mapp was MP for Auckland's North Shore constituency for 15 years and he says he's seen huge changes in the city in a short period of time.

18:55Ruth Evans:I travelled to South Island a fair bit and you go down to South Island and you sort of think this is what New Zealand was like 30 years ago. It feels very different to Auckland where I live which is a very cosmopolitan city indeed. We have a much bigger diversity in lifestyles, restaurants, all sorts of things like that, which is not present elsewhere in the country. But not everyone appreciates that diversity. Some people feel threatened by it. But in reality, our health service would probably collapse without the inwards migration, especially from Asia. If you go to any major hospital in Auckland, probably half the doctors and nurses will actually be new immigrants.

19:36Like many other countries, New Zealand has a rapidly ageing population. Soon, over 20 % of the population will be over 65. In some parts of the country, three times as many people are exiting the workforce than joining it. At the same time, says Paul Spoonley, fertility rates are falling for New Zealanders of European descent, but growing rapidly in other communities. What we've got are minority and indigenous groups that are beginning to grow very fast. So when we look at the baby boomers and those are reaching the age of 65, they will look like me. And I would call myself Pākehā, which means a European New Zealander.

20:18But when you look at the under 15 or under 25 year olds, it's much, much more diverse. And what we're going to see is that burgeoning. And by the 2040s, around 40 % of Auckland will be of Asian descent. And then for the country as a whole, one in four will be a member of one of the Asian communities. We're seeing this very significant growth in the Asian communities as part of our cultural diversity. These demographic changes are taking place against the backdrop of a complicated historical relationship between the European communities here and the indigenous Maori community.

21:01These are the annual Waitangi celebrations, marking the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi, the nation's founding document between the English governors of the time and the local heads of Maori tribes. In theory, the treaty ensured that Maori had the same rights and privileges as British citizens, including protection of their lands. In practice, the treaty's been controversial and contested ever since, says Professor Paul Spoonley. New Zealand began a journey really in the 1970s about giving a degree of sovereignty to Māori. And that sovereignty recognised their rights as people who'd signed a treaty. But it also made, for example, Māori language, Te Reo Māori, an official language of New Zealand.

21:46So I think we've got a relatively well-established bicultural framework. It is under attack at the moment. It's under attack from a nationalist minority coalition party, and it's under attack from a neoliberal minor coalition party who want to roll back some of that journey of recognising Māori as an indigenous community. The controversial principles of the treaty bill was recently introduced by a minor right-wing party in the current coalition government. The bill seeks to overturn what they perceive as a misinterpretation of the treaty that has led to special rights for Maori. The bill's proponents argue that this has created division and inequalities, and they aim to redefine the principles to ensure equality for all New Zealanders.

22:40The bill has led to strong opposition from Maori leaders, legal experts and opposition parties, and there have been protests and demonstrations, including the suspension of three MPs for performing the Haka in Parliament in protest against the bill. The coalition government, led by the National Party, initially agreed to support the bill through the first reading, but now both the National Party and New Zealand First, another coalition partner, have indicated they will not support the bill further, stating that the government's focus is on providing services based on need, not race, and that they are working to strengthen democracy for all New Zealanders.

23:23Maori are currently the second largest ethnic group in New Zealand and also growing fast. But do they feel threatened by the country's record levels of immigration and rapidly changing demographics? Wayne Mapp held a variety of ministerial portfolios, including Minister of Defence, in the National Party government from 2008 to 2011. He was also a member of the Maori Affairs Committee and his wife is a prominent Maori lawyer.

23:52Ruth Evans:There are some activists who would like to wind things back on the right. There's no question about that. That's a blip, frankly. Now, Māori have a confidence now about being positive and assertive about their culture, and that is a force that can't be stopped. And you can just see it. My wife is Māori, and I know from the extended family how powerful a voice that is. And they just look at what is largely an older Pākehāo European group who are resisting, and they think, yeah, your time's passed. Despite this resurgence in Maori confidence, he says there are some fears that New Zealand's increasing cultural diversity may undermine the Maori position.

24:39Ruth Evans:Maori people in particular fear their status in the country eroding a bit. We have a political party, which is a member of the government called New Zealand First, and they've always been against inwards migration. The leadership of that party has always been Maori, and I've always been of the view that that's what really drives their viewpoint. Sort of, they have a commitment and loyalty to what they imagine was a better New Zealand of the past, a bicultural New Zealand, and they have struggled a bit with the change. Sarah Colstratten is a Maori cultural advisor. I asked her whether Maori feel threatened by the country's increasingly multicultural demographics.

25:21If it was left up to us, there is no threat. We celebrate more. More is better. Our concern is that it's taken us so long in our reminding of the European community that have been here for centuries about our position here in Aotearoa New Zealand. We're not just a minority community. We are what we call the tangata whenua, the people of the land, or people might say indigenous or whatever you want. So when we see the multicultural, we love it, but our hope is that they would be informed about their special place in our country because they've certainly got a special place. We are a bicultural nation, meaning we recognise our relationship, our special relationship with Britain.