You’re needed at home, expat New Zealanders told
By Sarah Catherall

New Zealand Herald, New Zealand
March 13 2005

Diana Cook expected to stay away from New Zealand for only a year.
After growing up in the small Northland town of Kaikohe, the
Treasury-trained economist left a Wellington job for a position in
Ukraine six years ago. That job led to a role as an economic
consultant in Oxford, and now, as a consultant in London, she is part
of an international team providing expenditure advice to governments
in Serbia, Armenia and Bosnia.

The small-town girl is one of hundreds of thousands of skilled New
Zealanders the Government wants to lure home. But the 34-year-old has
bigger plans. She is about to start a new job in Britain, analysing
housing shortages in southeast England.

Asked if she would heed the call to return home, she says: “I do miss
family and friends and I think there would be interesting career
opportunities for me in New Zealand. The downside for me is New
Zealand’s isolation. It feels so small and so far away. Travel is
pretty expensive and I’d really miss the theatres and galleries, and
other entertainment options in London. So it’s more of a lifestyle
than a career choice for me to stay here.”

After calling mothers to the workforce to plug skill gaps, the
Government will soon launch a campaign targeting expats, focusing on
Kiwis’ emotional links to their homeland. We’re up against other
Western countries also campaigning for our skilled workers. And our
Government has an even bigger job than such countries as Australia –
with at least 14 per cent of working New Zealanders offshore
(Treasury’s estimate), we are first in the OECD in losing our
residents abroad.

Immigration Minister Paul Swain says the campaign will involve
“creative ways” of target-ing expats. He thinks many offshore Kiwis
have no idea that unemployment here is now the lowest in the OECD and
there are jobs to fill.

Says Swain: “When these people left in the 1990s, New Zealand would
have been a completely different place. Unemployment was still quite
high and there were too many people and not enough jobs. We now have
the complete reverse of that, with too many jobs and not enough
people. There are now opportunities for them that may not have been
around when they left. We’ll be saying we need them to give us a
hand.”

There are two types of expats overseas and one is possibly out of
reach. According to a Massey University “talent flow” study, there
are expats who expect to stay away, mainly driven by money, influence
and achievement; then there are those who plan to come home, who are
lured back by family, lifestyle and friends. About half of the 2201
expats surveyed last year described themselves as “permanently
settled” and 27 per cent of those were certain or likely to stay
overseas. A further 29 per cent were – like Cook – torn about where
they would end up.

Typically university-educated, many were working in the financial
sector. Just under half had been away from New Zealand for one to
five years, while half had been away for six years-plus. Asked what
needed to change for them to return home, most cited career
opportunities, higher pay and a better cost of living, along with
improved tax incentives for business.

But it is the emotional attractions likely to be highlighted in the
Government’s campaign: ageing parents and relatives, a yearning to
bring up children back home, safety, security, and lifestyle.

“Return to New Zealand apparently provides more of an attraction to
the family-oriented, the sociable and the presumably humanistic
medical staff, but repels those seeking career success and money, and
the successful … entrepreneurs,” the report says.

One of the researchers, Massey University business lecturer Duncan
Jackson, is not sure how easy it will be to entice Kiwis home. “We’ve
found that careers are pushing people overseas – both my brothers
went to London and they’ve found they could make astoundingly more
money over there and also enjoy career progression.”

When looking for carrots to dangle, we should look at countries like
Singapore, he says, which reduces student loans for those who agree
to stay home.

“There are schemes operating to hold people in other countries. Here
we have the student loan scheme which is unfair and punitive, and if
you have a massive loan and can earn three times more in the UK,
where would you go?”

The Massey study found only 10 per cent of participants had a student
loan, mainly because the mean age was 30-plus. “[The student loan]
can be expected to increase in importance as more and more young
qualified people go offshore,” it said.

One of those paying off his student loan is Mark Hotton, the
London-based editor of a newspaper for expat New Zealanders, New
Zealand News UK. Hotton is waiting for a highly skilled migrant visa
which will allow him to stay in London for at least another year and
possibly up to four. Student loans “are a major sticking point,” he
says. “The Government needs to address this or a whole generation of
Kiwis will take out loans and not come back to pay them off.”

New Zealand’s campaign comes as Australia also tries to keep its best
and brightest on home soil and increases its skilled migrant quota.
New Zealand shares a common job market with Australia, and both
countries are battling to find enough trades and technical staff.

Treasury policy manager Geoff Lewis says we suffer a similar problem
to countries such as Canada and Ireland, which lose talent to bigger
neighbours. Australia, which worries that it is bleeding talent, has
only 2.1 per cent of its nationals offshore. “We would like to have
lots of highly skilled people but we need the wages to attract them,”
he says.

That’s a point echoed by recruitment firms struggling to fill job
vacancies. Rob Young, a partner with Swann Recruitment, which fills
senior executive positions, says the strength of the Kiwi dollar and
low wages are turn-offs about returning to New Zealand. And while
there are jobs, career opportunities can be limited – take the senior
manager in Bahrain who was offered a $120,000 job to return to New
Zealand but was already earning double that.

At Phoenix Recruitment in Auckland, Jenny Durno has 150 chartered
accountancy vacancies to fill. Accountants are one profession the
country is short of, and Durno says Kiwis can earn between $75,000
and $108,000 in Australia for a job that would pay between $55,000
and $75,000 here.

On a recent trip home, Diana Cook found New Zealand “a bit insular”.
But in London she fights the crowds on her hour-long train journey to
and from work, then returns to her costly rental property with a tiny
garden. “A campaign should focus on the lifestyle benefits of New
Zealand,” she says.

However: “There’s not much a Government campaign could do to
encourage me to return really. It’s more of a personal trade-off that
I have to make.”