Hi,
We've been doing a lot of reading about living in NZ, both here on the forums and elsewhere, and everything about it sounds great.
However, I was doing a bit more digging yesterday and I came across a piece on the NZHerald website entitled "What can be done to stop skilled workers heading overseas?". Some of the views of the respondants are, to say the least, discouraging. As most of the respondents seems to be born and bred NZers, I would be interested in hearing some other views from recent or long term migrants.
There must be something like 150 respondents to this article and, although all of them agree that NZ is a beautiful place, very few of them have much positive to say in terms of politics, equality, employment, cost of living, home ownership, taxation, childcare and so on. I'm sure if you asked the same question here in the UK you would get the same kind of answers so I'm not sure how seriously we should take it.
Like anywhere else in the world, I wouldn't expect living in NZ to be without it's problems or issues. However, this article does raise some pretty important questions for us. Our reason for wanting to immigrate to NZ is to improve our quality of life. We're both outdoorsy people and living in South London no longer cuts it for us, whereas NZ can give it to us in abundance. We also like to socialise and travel, though, and I'm worried that the low wages and high
taxes/rates mentioned in this article would stop us from doing these things. I have 8 years experience working in interent development and my wife is a graphic designer, so our skills are pretty much in demand here in the UK and the salaries v's cost of living is just about favourable. Would we find the same thing in NZ?
For those of you reading this article in NZ, does any of it ring true or is it just a serious case of the grass is greener...? These are pretty serious issues for us and for the moment we have put the breaks on our plans until we can be otherwise reassured.
Thanks everyone for your time.
Here is a link to the article:
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/feature/st...0477438&pnum=0