Feature
Far-flung whanau
by Bruce Ansley
What began as the humble OE has become SOS – staying overseas, sometimes forever. But the message about our Kiwis overseas is, stop panicking and start tapping into the diaspora.
They’re our best and brightest. They earn a lot of money. They’re a growing, thriving population. They’re New Zealanders … and they’re choosing not to live here. Despite the fervent hopes of family and friends and the best efforts of governments, they’re not coming back. It’s another Kiwi nation, and it’s big. The OECD says almost 500,000 New Zealand-born souls live overseas. Even by that conservative standard, we head OECD-type countries in fleeing citizenry: only Ireland comes close.
But it’s bigger than that, swollen by partners, children, citizens who weren’t born here but have residence rights of one sort or another, immigrants who got citizenship then left. KEA, the Kiwi Expat Association, puts the figure at 1m; its head, Ross McConnell, can jack it up to 1.5m.
Researchers and statisticians believe that the number lies somewhere between the extremes, but everyone agrees on two points: the other country is between a fifth and a third of the home population; and it grows in size every year. “It will definitely increase,” says Statistics NZ statistician Robert Didham. “With families and children as part of the diaspora, it will increase even if the outflow doesn’t.”
What began as the humble OE, the overseas experience many sought in Australia or the United Kingdom, or Asia or Europe or America, returning triumphant after a couple of years, has become SOS: staying overseas. As Prime Minister Helen Clark acknowledged last year when launching a programme to entice them back, it’s a global battle: a shrinking workforce sets up a worldwide demand for skills, setting pay levels that New Zealanders at home can only dream about. Despite the TV commercials about homesick Kiwis, the fond notions of the quality of life back home, the social wage, the environmental return, the evidence is that they’re happy where they are.
Get used to it: they’re a permanent population.
So now we’re trying something new. The message about the nation overseas is, stop panicking. Start tapping into it.
Afresh survey sums up the trans-national community like this: hearts at home, pockets in another country.
KEA polled 18,000 expat New Zealanders. It found:
They’re wealthy. Almost a third of the prime age group (25-44) earned more than $100,000 a year. Back home that would put them in the top three percent. More than a third earned between $50,000 and $100,000. The biggest single group of them work in finance and insurance, the next being education, health and community services – the same groups that got the biggest pay rises here last year. They earn so much more than we do that railing about taxes is futile. Says Paul Callister, a researcher at Victoria University’s Policy Studies Institute: “When you’re earning $180,000 and coming home to a job at $80,000, whether the tax rate is 35 percent or 42 percent is neither here nor there. The important thing is the high income you can get elsewhere. You can fiddle with the tax rates, but the overall incomes are just so much higher, your standard of living so much better.”
They’re brighter and better educated than the rest of us. More than 80 percent of them had tertiary qualifications, compared with a third at home. Sixty percent had a bachelors degree or higher university qualification. Almost all of them – 82 percent – were educated at New Zealand’s expense.
They’re not coming home. Only 22 percent said they would return permanently. Another 27 percent said they probably would. But Alan Gamlen, a Kiwi researching the New Zealand diaspora at Oxford University in England and one of the survey’s architects, looks askance at the figures: “Have you ever met a migrant who didn’t intend to go home?” But – a crunch point, this – only a third have partners who are New Zealand citizens. Add children to that mix and you have one potent reason for many of them to stay where they are: it’s their partner’s home, mostly, and when their children go to school and get entrenched in another country’s system, the roots start running deep.
There’s really only one conclusion from this: we’re losing our best and brightest, a lot of them forever.
The question is, what to do about it.
Until now there have been only two real options: panic over the exodus or bring in more immigrants to replace them. The brain drain or the brain exchange; the first gloomy, the second chancy.
Says Richard Bedford, of Waikato University’s migration research group: “If we get hung up on the fact that people go overseas, we’re going to tie ourselves in a terrible knot, because it’s all about making your way in the world.”
So a new focus is emerging. Get real. Accept that there’s a whole nation – researchers prefer “diaspora” – who no longer live here and who may never come home but still maintain close ties with this country.
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