NZ lifestyle not enough to keep Kiwis home

The much-vaunted quality of life in New Zealand may no longer be enough to keep Kiwis at home, with high wages and family ties drawing growing numbers across the Tasman.

In the year to July, 32,600 New Zealanders made a long-term move to Australia, with 500 going to both Britain and the United Arab Emirates and 400 to Canada.

Net migration last crested 30,000 in 2001, and in seven of the past 10 years more than 20,000 New Zealanders have crossed the Tasman.

Statistics New Zealand figures show people from all walks of life have made the move, led by sales workers, professionals and trades workers (each 2100), along with 13,200 people without an occupation, most of whom were children or students.

News this week that the average Australian wage of $NZ1398 a week dwarfs New Zealand's $886 is expected to make the Lucky Country seem more alluring to potential migrants.

Council of Trade Unions economist Peter Conway said that while money was an important factor for workers, migration to Australia was becoming generational and ingrained behaviour for New Zealanders.

"The really concerning thing about the numbers we have now is that it's starting to look like a long-run trend," he said.

"It's not the fact we've lost over 30,000 in any one year, because that's happened before. There is a gravity effect around this.

"If you go to Sydney and you need a bed for the first couple of weeks, chances are you are going to know someone; you'll have a cousin there or something.

"It's just become so much easier to go back and forth. Fifty-two per cent of our long-term immigrants go to Australia ... and it's not really overseas to people any more."

Conway has studied wages on both sides of the Tasman for several years.

Taking into account annual exchange rates and purchasing power disparities, there was a 36.4% gap between Australian and New Zealand wages.

"People say it's all about mining, but if you take mining out of their productivity figures and take agriculture, forestry and fishing out of ours, you have still got a huge gap with Australia," he said.

"They are a bigger economy so they get a bit of an agglomeration effect, but also they have kept investing in capital and kept investing in skills, and they have had a better way of investing the rewards."

Jonathan Greening, a manager with international recruitment firms Hays, said not every Kiwi worker should expect a mega-pay day if they moved to Australia as wage rates were comparable in several sectors.

"It's fundamental demand and supply. They won't pay more for the man in the street, but they will pay more for the exceptional," he said.

The ease and low cost of trans-Tasman travel made Australia an attractive destination for workers, Greening said.

"You can quite easily test to see if the grass is actually greener.

"Going to Britain or Dubai is quite a major move; going to Australia is quite an easy move to make and it is easily reversible," he said.

"Anywhere else is quite a hard change to make it terms of visas etc. With $400 flights, the whole family can be home for $1500, whereas that will probably get you halfway to Dubai. It's an easy opportunity."

New Zealand Institute of Management chief executive David Chapman said retention of executive-level staff had been a long-term problem.

"There would be a lot of New Zealand families and mine would be no exception where the bright young people head off to Sydney and so forth because that's where the bank wants to take them because that's where the big jobs are," he said.

"That's been a worry for a while now. It's a bit like the drift from Wellington to Auckland, but now it's the New Zealand-Australia drift."

Chapman said the Kiwi lifestyle was no longer enough of an incentive for managers to stay in New Zealand compared with their career ambitions.

"What drives managers is the companies that they work for, and the problem in recent times is that the ownership of a lot of those companies has moved to Australia and that has tended to relegate New Zealand to branch office operations," he said.

"That means a lot of our good management talent gets taken to Australia to the headquarters of these companies. That has been going on for a few years now."