Australia has never looked more appealing

It came as no surprise to read that the number of New Zealanders leaving the country approached record levels in the year to August 31.

There was a net migration loss of 42,600 New Zealand citizens, not far short of the record loss of 44,400 in 2012. More than half of those leavers were bound for Australia.

Overall, migration figures show an unprecedented population increase. Annual migrant arrivals reached an all-time high of 225,400. Most of the new arrivals came from India, China, the Philippines, Fiji and South Africa.

New Zealand must seem an attractive destination to people from countries suffering from overcrowding, poverty, political repression, pollution, violence and corruption. But the migration figures also tell another, less encouraging story.

New Zealand is looking less and less hospitable to people who have grown up here. They remember what the country of their birth used to be like and they know what it’s capable of being. They have watched with dismay as a prosperous, settled, liberal democracy has been destabilised and transformed into a squabbling, sullen and ill-tempered society that they no longer recognise.

They have not only seen economic prospects – historically a key driver of emigration – diminished by an incompetent, profligate government; they have also watched with mounting disquiet as social cohesion has been undermined by extreme, officially sanctioned ideological agendas that have prevailed unchallenged since 2020.

Even more depressingly, many see little prospect of improvement post-election. Small wonder, then, that so many New Zealanders find Australia appealing. I suspect that many of those who have already left shut the door behind them, albeit regretfully, and have no intention of returning. Those of us who remain are diminished by their loss.

As is often the pattern with external migration, many of those who have gone will have been skilled, highly educated and ambitious for social and economic advancement. As Kiwibank economist Jarrod Kerr observed, “We lose trained, smart individuals. That is something that worries us.”

The leavers will no doubt have been encouraged by an Australian law change last year that eased the pathway to Australian citizenship. This was naively greeted by the media – and celebrated by the New Zealand government – as a breakthrough after years of Australian intransigence.

In fact the Australians would have been motivated less by a sudden, uncharacteristic rush of goodwill toward their neighbours across the Ditch than by the realisation that opening the doors to talented and well-trained New Zealanders made perfect sense, especially when a recovering post-Covid Australian economy was desperate for skilled, hard-working (and English-speaking) people.

In other words, what was played up by New Zealand politicians as a gain was in fact Australia cleverly taking advantage of mounting social, political and economic unease under a floundering Labour government here. To put it bluntly, we were screwed. And it worked: the Guardian reported in August that New Zealanders were applying for Australian citizenship at the rate of 375 a day.

The latest migration figures particularly resonated with me because my wife and I have just spent two weeks in Queensland. While there, I couldn’t help but be struck by the vibrant, dynamic, prosperous vibe and the general mood of positivity. It stood in striking contrast to the sulky, bitchy mood at home.

We stayed with my brother-in-law and his wife in Brisbane and our son and his family in Noosa. They enjoy a very good life, a high standard of living and didn’t give me the impression of pining for home.

I drove up to Hervey Bay to visit a cousin, I spent an enjoyable day with a former colleague from my Nelson Evening Mail days and we had a long lunch with an old friend of our son who moved to Brisbane many years ago. Our friend's parents and siblings had made the move too.

They are among the estimated 670,000-plus New Zealanders living in Australia. Two nephews and a niece have also settled there, along with several old school friends and an almost uncountable number of ex-workmates. Most are still proud to call themselves Kiwis but they are better off there.

We spent several years in Australia in the early 1970s – our first child was born there – but I had never thought about returning there to live. This time I did. The appeal of Australia historically ebbs and flows, but right now it’s running very high.

It’s not just the lure of the climate and the beaches, enticing though they are. It’s something much more elemental than that. It’s the feeling that New Zealand has become a broken, demoralised society – a perception accentuated when I made the mistake of visiting NZ news websites while in Queensland and read mostly about violent crime and failing infrastructure.

As a former news editor I have to remind myself that a lot of news is, by definition, bad. Still, stories about a massive sinkhole opening up in the centre of Auckland and the unexplained damage to the iconic Ranfurly Shield (not to mention the implication that illegal drugs were involved in the latter incident) seemed somehow symbolic of a country in decline.

This negative perception was magnified on the bus trip into Wellington from the airport on our return. The once proud capital (remember the “Absolutely Positively Wellington” campaign?) looked like Dublin in the 1980s, which is not a flattering comparison. The first people we saw on the streets were a trio of high-as-a-kite derelicts falling about in a Kilbirnie bus shelter. Vape shops and tattoo parlours lined the route and the city generally looked unkempt and unloved. It couldn't have made a more striking contrast with the shining, humming Brisbane we had left behind.

Of course Australia has its issues too. Tomorrow’s referendum on whether Aborigines should have a constitutionally enshrined “voice” in Parliament was the dominant story while we were there, and it’s an issue as divisive as co-governance (with which it has obvious parallels) here.

Australia, like New Zealand and virtually every other English-speaking democracy, is also mired in the culture wars initiated by neo-Marxists in the universities. But from the perspective of a New Zealander, these problems, as long as they occur in Australia, have the great virtue of being someone else’s. I don’t feel I have any emotional stake in them, nor any right to pronounce an opinion. Here is different; this is my country.

All of which brings us to the election. And for the first time, after a lot of thought, I’ve decided to exercise a passive protest by not casting a party vote. I will be among the hundreds of thousands of abstainers who threaten to make this the lowest turnout in New Zealand election history. 

It’s not just that I find the options too thoroughly depressing. Rather, I see no good whatsoever coming from this election and don’t want to feel responsible in any way for the outcome – which, however the voting plays out, will almost inevitably perpetuate the paralysing malaise gripping the country and condemn us to further decline. 

In the end, the decision came down to a relatively simple calculus. Do I desperately want to get rid of the Labour government and its Green hangers-on? Yes. But even to the extent of giving my vote to parties that I can't in conscience support? No.

I won’t join the exodus to Australia, because we have deep family attachments here. But New Zealand feels buggered, not to put too fine a point on it, and I have no confidence that whatever wretched, compromised hybrid government rises from the post-election swamp after tomorrow will have the will, the ability or the moral fibre to fix it.

A nation of smiling zombies

[I wrote the following article for the Australian edition of 'The Spectator'. It was published in the issue of June 26.]

In his best-selling 1976 book The Passionless People, the late author and journalist Gordon McLauchlan characterised his fellow New Zealanders as “smiling zombies”: polite, cheerful and hard-working, but smug and compliant. It was cruel but not inaccurate.

It takes a lot to provoke New Zealanders politically. The last time it happened was in 1981, when a tour by the South African Springbok rugby team tore the country apart.

Since then, Kiwis have largely reverted to their default setting of complacency and passivity. Which makes it all the easier for Jacinda Ardern’s Labour government to push through an agenda of radical transformation quite unlike any the country has experienced before.

New Zealanders returning after a few years abroad might wonder whether they’ve blundered into a parallel universe. A government that is pitifully thin on ministerial ability and experience is busy re-inventing the wheel, and doing it at such speed that the public has barely had time to catch its breath. To quote one seasoned political observer:  “It seems like a hostile takeover of our country is underway, and most people feel powerless to do anything about it.”

The most visible change might crudely be described as Maorification, much of it aggressively driven by activists of mixed Maori and European descent who appear to have disowned their problematical white colonial lineage. Self-identifying as Maori not only taps into a fashionable culture of grievance and victimism, but enables them to exercise power and influence that would otherwise not be available to them.

In the mainstream media, Maori place names, most of them previously unknown to the great majority of New Zealanders and unused even by people of Maori descent, have displaced the official names bestowed by British colonists – ignoring the inconvenient fact that New Zealand’s cities and towns are British, not Maori, creations.

The government has done its best to ensure continued media support for this ideological project by creating a $55 million slush fund supposedly created to support “public interest journalism” but available only to news organisations that commit themselves to the promotion of the so-called principles (never satisfactorily defined) of the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi. 

What has been framed as an idealistic commitment to the survival of journalism is, in other words, a cynical and opportunistic bid for control over the news media at a time when the industry is floundering.  This is a government so shameless, or perhaps so convinced of its own untouchability, that it’s brazenly buying the media’s compliance. 

Not that bribery is necessary. Turn on Radio New Zealand’s flagship news and current affairs programme and you’ll routinely hear virtue-signalling presenters making announcements in Maori, a language spoken fluently by only 1 per cent of the population.

Similarly, the country is routinely referred to by the media and political elites as Aotearoa, despite the name being of dubious authenticity. All this has happened with no public mandate, but encouraged by a government that seems determined to promote division between New Zealanders of Maori and European descent. 

In local government, city and district councils have rushed to create exclusively Maori wards – an innovation made possible by an abrupt legislative change, despite being previously rejected when challenged in local referendums.  Result: a previously colour-blind system has been changed to one where representation can be based on race.

The politics of race are equally evident at the national level, where the government proposes to establish a Maori Health Authority which will exist alongside a new national health agency and have power to veto its decisions.

Changes in the health sector reflect another dominant trend under Labour: a return to Big Government.  In education and local government as well as health, power is being stripped from local administrators and placed in the hands of unwieldy central bureaucracies, remote from the people they supposedly serve.

In other radical changes, union power is being restored through a return to a discredited national pay agreements system, and proposed “hate speech” laws will place new restrictions on freedom of expression.

Meanwhile the government is showering money on pet causes such as cycling, announcing recently that it would commit $785 million to a second Auckland Harbour bridge that will be used only by cyclists and walkers. The plan was rightly ridiculed as humouring a small but vociferous minority of the affluent middle classes.

It didn’t go unnoticed that this indulgence was announced only days after nurses, with overwhelming public support, staged a national strike in support of pay claims that would have cost the government far less. It was a telling demonstration of Labour’s priorities.

So far, the smiling zombies – five million of them – have tacitly condoned all this radical transformation through their silence. This can partly be attributed to the still-potent Ardern Effect, the political fairy dust that a charismatic young prime minister scattered over the country following the 2019 Christchurch mosque massacres and again when the Covid-19 pandemic struck.

But it’s possible to sense a mounting pushback, particularly in those parts of the media – such as commercial radio – that haven’t been ideologically captured. Opposition to Labour’s agenda has been fuelled in recent weeks by concerns over a compulsory school history curriculum that will indoctrinate pupils with neo-Marxist theories of colonisation and white privilege; by the ascendancy of violent criminal gangs that the police seem unwilling or unable to challenge; and by the announcement of generous taxpayer subsidies for electric cars (another handout to the privileged middle class), with corresponding punitive taxes on diesel vehicles that will hit farmers and tradies – two groups that are crucial in propping up an economy severely hit by the downturn in international tourism.

Potentially even more damaging to Ardern’s government, because it hits ordinary people at a very basic level, is the shambolic incompetence of the Covid-19 vaccination programme, and the growing perception that the public has been continually fed falsehoods about the pandemic and the government’s response to it.

Ardern’s famous charisma is faltering and the earnest, imploring expression she wears whenever she faces the media, so effective in Christchurch two years ago, is wearing thin.

It’s widely assumed that she’s still unassailable, and her poll ratings appear to support that. But if Ardern has studied 20^th century history, she’ll know that even Winston Churchill’s nation-saving leadership of Britain during the 1939-45 war wasn’t enough to guarantee re-election once the voters decided they’d had enough of him.

New Zealand is being transformed, but not in a good way

[I wrote this piece for the latest edition of The Spectator Australia.]

Prime minister Jacinda Ardern promised, on the night of her general election triumph last October, to govern for all New Zealanders. But her Labour government is pursuing policies that will entrench racial separatism, undermine democracy, turbocharge the grievance culture and promote polarisation and divisiveness.

The immediate threats come from proposals to outlaw “hate speech”, however that may be defined, and bestow special privilege on people who identify as Maori by allowing city and district councils to create exclusively Maori wards. In the longer term, the government is likely to seize on climate change as justification for policies that could deliver a savage blow to the country’s most dynamic productive sector.

Add to that the politicisation of education, in the form of a new, Marxist-influenced history curriculum that portrays Maori as a race still oppressed by colonialism, and you have a perfect ideological storm. New Zealand sometimes feels as if it’s in the grip of a Year Zero cult similar in tone, if not in scale, to that promoted in Pol Pot’s Kampuchea (Cambodia), where everything that had gone before was renounced.

To take those developments one by one:

■ Urged on by inflammatory rhetoric from an ideologically driven Human Rights Commission and a handful of vociferous immigrant activists whose views are at odds with those of their communities, Labour has vowed to introduce tight controls on what New Zealanders may legally say about matters of race and religion (and very likely gender and body shape too). The government cites the Christchurch mosque massacres as justification, although a royal commission failed to find any evidence that lax “hate speech” laws allowed or even encouraged Brenton Tarrant (who, it should be remembered, was an Australian) to embark on his killing spree.

■ Labour is encouraging the creation of designated Maori seats on city and district councils, despite the idea being resoundingly rejected by voters in local referendums wherever they have been proposed. A law change will not only give Maori (or more correctly, part-Maori) candidates a short cut to representation by enabling them to avoid the inconvenience of winning popular support, but will result in the election of councillors responsible only to people who claim Maori ancestry.

Under present law, any person of Maori descent can stand for office and win a seat, and many do. The crucial difference is that the law change will guarantee seats under a preferential, race-based system. The irony that this is being done in the name of racial equality is lost on leftist zealots.

■ The government is expected to embrace climate change recommendations that would punish the farming sector – now more than ever the country’s economic lifeline following Covid-19’s devastating effect on tourism. Farmers will be rewarded for keeping New Zealand afloat economically for more than 100 years by having their livestock numbers slashed and being ordered to replace diesel utes with electric vehicles.  Will this concern Labour MPs? Not likely, since hardly any represent rural constituencies and few show any interest in economic realities. For Labour, the economy is not so much about generating income as redistributing it.

■ Having shamefully ignored New Zealand history in the past, education bureaucrats have taken advantage of an ideological tail-wind by approving a draft curriculum that’s drenched in neo-Marxist identity politics and presents the country’s past as one characterised by the oppressive effects of colonialism on Maori. Will teachers be permitted to mention that colonialism also brought an end to centuries of savage tribal warfare, slavery and cannibalism? Don’t bank on it.

All of this would be alarming enough, but is made more so because no one is standing in the way. New Zealand First, the conservative government coalition partner that acted as a handbrake on Labour between 2017 and 2020, much to the chagrin of the Left, lost all its seats in the election – punishment for a record fatally tarnished by dodgy and opaque backroom dealings.

What, then, of the National party, nominally Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition? Reduced from 56 to 33 seats in the 120-seat parliament, National is in abject disarray – floundering, demoralised and apparently rudderless after its humiliating election rout.

Historically the dominant force in New Zealand politics, it seems to be waiting for a new messiah to guide it out of the wilderness. Current leader Judith Collins rejoices in the sobriquet “Crusher”, bestowed by the media when she was a tough-talking cabinet minister in John Key’s government, but Kitten would be a more appropriate nickname as she allows herself to be browbeaten almost daily by Labour cheerleaders in the parliamentary press gallery.

Ah yes, the press. In a properly functioning democracy, the media can be relied on, when all else fails, to hold governments to account; but not in New Zealand in 2021. Ardern and her government get a free run from admiring journalists – many of them young and female – who are enthralled that their prime minister is internationally feted as a model leader by left-leaning papers such as the New York Times and the Guardian. The media’s capture by the woke left was never better demonstrated than when the country’s biggest print company devoted acres of newsprint over several days to a hand-wringing mea culpa for decades of supposedly racist reporting that marginalised Maori.  

None of the above conveys adequately the scale or force of the ideological tsunami currently washing over New Zealand. Other manifestations include the almost complete takeover of the public conversation by proponents of divisive identity politics; the vindictive daily denunciations of people whose opinions, until quite recently, were considered not only legitimate but mainstream; and the massive power grab by people who have reclaimed (or rediscovered) their Maoriness.

The danger is that most New Zealanders, being essentially passive, easy-going and good-natured, will ignore the tumult and just try to get on with lives – until they wake up one morning and realise that the open, tolerant and fair-minded society they grew up in has irrevocably changed. 

A potent antidote to toxic wokeism

I’ve been enjoying a book that an old friend gave me for Christmas. This Is Us: New Zealanders in Our Own Words was written (or perhaps I should say compiled) by Pete Carter, whom I’d never heard of, and was inspired by the 2019 Christchurch mosque shootings.

It might seem downright perverse to say I’m enjoying a book inspired by one of the darkest events in our history, but it isn’t about the shootings. Rather, it was written as a reaction to them. The title is a play on Jacinda Ardern’s famous comment in which she said of the victims, “They are us” – three words that encapsulated the ideal of a culturally diverse and inclusive New Zealand.

Carter took that as a cue to interview 200 New Zealanders about their lives. The resulting book is a resounding affirmation of the values and qualities that make this one of the world’s most tolerant, civilised and liberal (in the classical sense) societies.

This Is Us thus serves as a potent antidote not just to the poisonous ideology that motivated Brenton Tarrant, but also to the shrill, embittered disciples of wokeness – and their many supporters in the media – who condemn New Zealand as hateful, bigoted and oppressive.

Carter’s interview subjects represent a snapshot of contemporary New Zealand. The book touches almost every point on the demographic spectrum: white and coloured, young and old, urban and rural, blue-collar battlers and prosperous blue-bloods, New Zealand-born and recently arrived. There are shearers, schoolkids, checkout operators, butchers, tattooists, ski instructors, solo mums, hairdressers, artists, winemakers, hospitality workers, nurses, cops, road workers, bus drivers, ex-cons and bank managers.

Refreshingly, only two or three of the interview subjects could be described as famous. Most are unknown and all are identified only by their first names. The Usual Suspects - the wearisomely familiar people who normally dominate the public conversation - are conspicuous by their absence, and the book is all the better for it.

The interviews are short, mostly taking up only half a page and each accompanied by a photo of the interviewee. They are engagingly frank and idiosyncratic, touching on everything from jobs and careers to sport, religion, mental health, family history and relationships. All the subjects have interesting stories to tell.

This Is Us is not a whitewash. As Carter notes in his introduction, there is racism in New Zealand (undoubtedly, but it doesn’t define us). Mental illness is a problem, he says, and there are too many have-nots.

But if there’s a unifying theme running through the interviews, it’s one of positivity and optimism. Whether they were born here or arrived as immigrants, the interviewees convey a powerful feeling that New Zealand is a good place to be. I defy anyone to read it and not feel the same.

Perhaps this explains why I’ve seen very little publicity about this book, and no reviews. It’s far too much at odds with the relentlessly negative, self-flagellating message promoted by woke ideologues and pushed daily by their hand-wringing accomplices in the media.  

■ This Is Us: New Zealanders in Our Own Words is published by Exisle Publishing and is widely available for $39.99. I heartily recommend it.

A perfect antidote to the coronavirus scare

(First published in the Manawatu Standard and on Stuff.co.nz, April 1).

While our fellow New Zealanders were angsting over the escalating coronavirus crisis last month, my wife and I were on the road. It was possibly the best place to be.

There’s something to be said for isolation, and I don’t mean the isolation everyone has experienced over the past week in their homes. In our case it came from being in remote places where access to newspapers, TV, the Internet and even radio was intermittent and sometimes non-existent. This meant we were able to make our way around some of the scenic nooks and crannies of the upper North Island largely untroubled by the increasingly gloomy news emanating from Wellington.

And when I say scenic, I mean scenic. There is no more effective antidote to a looming health catastrophe than the visual distraction of the New Zealand landscape.

Our route took us through Hawke’s Bay, the Volcanic Plateau, the Bay of Plenty, the King Country, the Waikato and North Auckland. Everywhere we went, New Zealand from the road was a joy to behold. It just keeps looking lovelier.

It’s not just the obviously outstanding physical features, such as mountains, lakes and beaches, that make this country so pleasing to the eye. On a more basic level, it’s something very simple: trees. Nothing transforms the landscapes so much as trees, and over my lifetime I’ve watched as they’ve grown and proliferated throughout rural New Zealand.

Despite the opprobrium heaped on them for supposedly raping the land for profit, farmers deserve much of the credit for this. Early pastoralists may have stripped the land bare in their eagerness to turn it into grass, but subsequent generations of farmers understood the aesthetic value of trees and we all benefit.

So where did we go? Well, we stayed at Ohiwa, a magical spot in the eastern Bay of Plenty where the camping ground nestles under a pohutukawa-clad bluff, at the top of which, if you don’t mind a bit of a climb, you can see the remains of fortified pa sites, strategically located so as to command a view of advancing enemies.

Maori history is all around us, but it’s often not obvious. You have to seek it out, but it’s there – as in the Hukutaia Domain, near Opotiki, where we gazed in silent awe at a massive, 2000-year-old puriri tree called Taketakerau, the Burial Tree, under which the Upokorehe iwi interred the bones of their distinguished dead.

Ohiwa has the great advantage of being out of reach of what I call the Auckland Effect. No offence to our biggest city, but Auckland is like a gradually spreading stain whose economic and cultural imprint extends far beyond its official territorial boundaries.

As with London and the rest of Britain, there is Auckland and then there is the rest of New Zealand. It exists in its own bubble, but one that keeps expanding. From Auckland north to Warkworth is effectively one giant construction zone.

Pahi, on the Kaipara Harbour, is distant enough to have escaped the Auckland Effect too. I wanted to go there because it was where an uncle of mine had a hideaway, and I reasoned – correctly, as it turned out – that he would have chosen it for the best of reasons.

It’s an enchantingly pretty and serene corner of the world. From our caravan site at Pahi we looked out over an arm of the Kaipara at a scene depicted in a Dick Frizzell painting that hangs in our lounge. We bought the Frizzell print years ago because the place he painted, called Whakapirau, was so unmistakeably New Zealand. I’m pleased to report that although there are a few more houses at Whakapirau now (and the classic Kiwi caravan on the hillside in Frizzell's painting is nowhere to be seen), its essential character is unchanged.

I can’t mention Pahi without returning to the subject of trees, because it’s the site of a magnificent Moreton Bay fig tree thought to have been planted before the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi. And 15 minutes’ drive away is the justly famous Matakohe Kauri Museum, which intrigued me because while it celebrates this most majestic of trees, it simultaneously pays tribute to the rugged and resourceful men who cut them down and milled them.

So what else did we do? We enjoyed a spectacular sunset framed by elegantly sculpted macrocarpas at Muriwai Beach. On the Napier-Taupo road I bored my wife for the umpteenth time about what the road was like when I was kid, when it was unsealed and tortuously slow and deer sometimes crossed in front of you.  In Tauranga we missed a crucial turnoff amid road works and I cursed the NZTA – again, not for the first time – for its pathetically inadequate signage.

We also had one of those two-degrees-of-separation moments when we found that another couple among the four in our tour group at the Waitomo Caves used to live just along the road from us. Only in New Zealand …

Oh, and we were rudely woken when our caravan was rammed by a rogue ute at 4.30am in the Port Waikato camping ground, but that’s a story for another time.

Les Walters and that advertising slogan

(First published in The Dominion Post and on Stuff.co.nz, December 26.)

A long time ago, I worked alongside a reporter named Leslie Walters.

Les got into journalism after a stint in the army. He was a likeable character with an idiosyncratic view of the world.

It soon became apparent that Les wasn’t exactly suited to the role of hack reporter, writing formulaic news stories about car accidents and council meetings.

His career might have gone nowhere had it not been for the late Frank Haden, editor of what was then the Sunday Times. Frank appreciated Les’s offbeat sense of humour and had the good sense to give him some stylistic freedom.

The result was a mad, anarchic weekly feature that combined elements of Monty Python, Spike Milligan and Private Eye. Les seemed to inhabit a parallel universe. It wasn’t journalism, but it was funny and original and it attracted something of a cult following.

Perhaps inevitably, it also attracted the attention of a recruiter from an advertising agency, which brings me to the point of this column.

It was in advertising that Les found his niche. And if his name means nothing to most New Zealanders, those of a certain age will certainly remember the slogan he was credited with creating for the tourism industry in the 1980s. “Don’t leave town till you’ve seen the country” was aimed at encouraging people to experience New Zealand rather than book plane tickets to foreign destinations.

It’s a phrase that has insinuated itself into the national consciousness, rather like “The drink you have when you’re not having a drink”, which came from roughly the same era and is remembered long after the brand it advertised (Claytons) vanished.

I thought about Les’s slogan while on a recent caravan trip with my wife around the top half of the South Island. His advice remains as true now as it was three decades ago.

At Ashley Gorge in North Canterbury, we had one of the country’s most exquisite camping grounds to ourselves (although to be fair, it was fully booked the following weekend, which was Canterbury’s Anniversary Weekend).

At remote Lake Coleridge, we marvelled at the grit of the engineers and workers who created one of the country’s earliest hydro-electric power stations in a beautiful but inhospitable landscape. My father, who was an engineer with the State Hydro-Electric Department, would have been fascinated.

On the return drive, the view over the vast, braided bed of the Rakaia River against its mountain backdrop almost literally stopped us in our tracks. You can see why the Canterbury high country captivated artists like Rita Angus and Bill Sutton.

We drove through charming little North Canterbury towns with Tolkienesque names like Windwhistle and Glentunnel, the latter with its fabulously eccentric gazebo-shaped brick post office (still in use).

On the road across Arthur’s Pass, we played vehicular leap-frog with rental camper vans that were constantly pulling off to the side of the highway so their goggle-eyed occupants could take pictures.

We roamed in the chilly, swirling mists at the top of the Denniston Incline, where a hardy community of 1400 people once eked a living from coal. It’s an extraordinary place that all New Zealanders should make the effort to visit.

Quirky takeaway fact: it was said that the local football team had an advantage against visiting sides because the Denniston players were able to locate the ball by ear in the thick fog. They were also known to take advantage of the poor visibility by sneaking extra players onto the field.

At Runanga, we admired the famous old miners’ hall (c. 1908) with its faded socialist slogan “The World’s Wealth for the World’s Workers”. It remains true that more than any other part of New Zealand, the Coast has a culture all its own.

We did some of the standard touristy things: Punakaiki, Farewell Spit, the celebrated Mussel Inn in Golden Bay (greatly over-rated, if you ask me, with a menu that wouldn’t require much more culinary skill than KFC).

But here’s the thing: Almost everywhere we went, our fellow travellers were from overseas. At lonely Lake Coleridge, at the end of a rough and dusty road that would deter a lot of drivers, we met an adventurous Scandinavian woman touring alone on a motorbike.

In a camping ground at Greymouth, we shared the kitchen with a big group of Israelis. At Denniston, we shared the mist with tourists from Australia.

On the long, winding road to French Pass, surely one of New Zealand’s most spectacular drives, most of the vehicles we passed were rentals of the type that overseas visitors hire. I was impressed to see an intrepid Asian woman tackling the route alone.

Not for the first time, I marvelled at the number of foreign tourists who find their way to beautiful, out-of-the-way places that most New Zealanders never see. Outsiders seem to appreciate our country in a way that not all New Zealanders do.

Okay, it wasn’t the holiday season, so we probably weren’t seeing a typical sample. Still, I couldn’t help thinking of Les Walters and his advertising slogan. 

So now we know: we're a nation of racists and Islamophobes

(First published in The Dominion Post and on Stuff.co.nz., March 21.)

You may have thought, as I did, that the Christchurch shootings were the act of a lone-wolf fanatic.

You may have thought, as I did, that no one saw it coming,

You may have thought, as I did, that New Zealand reacted with a genuine and overwhelming outpouring of shock, grief and anguish.

You may have thought that thousands showed their solidarity with Christchurch Muslims by attending public vigils, spontaneously setting up tribute sites and donating millions to a Givealittle appeal.

You may have thought that the Christchurch Muslim community, which could have been forgiven for withdrawing into itself, responded to the calamity with a remarkable spirit of openness, inclusivity and forgiveness.

You may have thought that our own shock was mirrored by that of the outside world, which was aghast that such terrible things could happen in a country viewed internationally as peaceful, tolerant and respectful toward minority groups.

Well, it seems we all got it wrong. Because in the days following the shootings, an alternative narrative emerged.

According to this alternative narrative, we are a hateful nation of racists, white supremacists and Islamophobes.

Not only that, but the massacre was no surprise. A sudden outburst of violent race hatred was bound to happen. Rather like the cataclysmic earthquake we are constantly warned to be prepared for, it was not a question of if, but when.

It was, we were told, the inevitable outcome of a society which condones hate speech.

The former narrative, the one most of us never thought to challenge, was the dominant one in the mainstream media, but the alternative version – let’s call it the “We told you so” version - gained a lot of traction on the online comment platforms favoured by the commentariat.

It’s a narrative of self-loathing that wants us to think the worst of ourselves. It’s a narrative that shamelessly seeks to politicise the killings and create a moral panic in the hope not only that we’ll tighten the gun ownership laws – no arguments there – but far more ominously, that we might be persuaded to discard such democratic niceties as freedom of speech.

We were told, for example, that Islamophobia is “deeply embedded in our society”. That comment came from former Green MP and lifelong sanctimonious far-Left finger-wagger Keith Locke, who quoted former Race Relations Commissioner Dame Susan Devoy as saying that every Muslim woman she knew had faced racist abuse.

We were told that Muslims in New Zealand wouldn’t be safe until we had tough new laws governing “hate speech”, however that might be defined. We were urged to dispense with old-fashioned democratic notions of free speech and balanced debates.

According to this argument, some views are so self-obviously correct that no one should be allowed to challenge them and others are so self-obviously contemptible that they must be prohibited.  It worries me deeply that I frequently hear this line even from journalists, who should be the first to defend the barricades when freedom of speech is at risk.

We were told too that the Islamic Women’s Council had been trying for years to alert the government to the existence of extreme racists and Islamophobes in New Zealand.

But I found it hard to reconcile that statement with the interview I heard on the BBC with a Muslim woman from Christchurch who said she and her family came to New Zealand because it was safe. She told BBC correspondent Rupert Wingfield-Hayes she had never felt threatened here.

This leaves me wondering exactly who the Islamic Women’s Council represents and what its agenda might be. None of the Muslims I saw and heard being interviewed in the painful days following the shootings expressed even a faint hint of recrimination. None blamed their adopted country or mentioned Islamophobia.

On the contrary, they gave the impression of cherishing their lives here and seemed as perplexed as the rest of us by the violence – which, we need to keep reminding ourselves, was perpetrated by a non-New Zealander.

Obviously, people like Keith Locke weren’t listening. Or perhaps they ignore anything that doesn’t align with their preferred narrative of a divided, oppressive society.

Yes, it’s deplorable that Muslim women are sometimes abused. But who should we allow to serve as the model that dictates the agenda: a few misanthropic cranks who haven’t yet got their heads around the new multicultural New Zealand, or the countless thousands of New Zealanders who attended vigils, donated money or quietly grieved at home for fellow citizens who happen to be Muslim?

Call me a Pollyanna, but the latter group says a lot more to me about the sort of society New Zealand is than isolated instances of abuse in shopping malls.

Long Bay: a reminder of what we value about living in New Zealand

(First published in the Manawatu Standard, the Nelson Mail and Stuff.co.nz., March 20.)

I’m writing this column in a camping ground at Long Bay, on the Coromandel Peninsula.

It’s Sunday morning. From where our caravan is parked I could almost spit into the sea, if I were of a mind to.

There are bush-covered headlands to the north and south of the bay and pohutukawa trees line the shore. Last night I heard the quintessential New Zealand nocturnal sound of a ruru (morepork) calling.

At the moment the tide is out and I can see kids fossicking on the rocks. The floating platform that people were diving from when we arrived here yesterday is virtually high and dry.

Earlier this morning I watched a family harvesting cockles. The sea is flat calm, the air is warm and there’s a gentle breeze blowing.

Beyond the bay I can see a string of pretty islands: Motukopake, Motuoruhi and other, smaller ones whose names I don’t know. Somewhere in the distance, hidden in the haze on the other side of the Hauraki Gulf, is Auckland.

Unlike some of the camping grounds my wife and I have stayed in over the past few days, this one is unmistakeably Kiwi. It’s not flash but it’s friendly and it has all the essentials.

Most of our fellow campers are tradies who have done well and bought caravans and boats. Dogs are permitted in the camping ground and behave themselves impeccably, with the exception of the camping ground owner’s one-eyed border collie, which runs in front of the camp’s maintenance ute barking furiously and trying to bite the tyres.

The maintenance man tells me the dog does this only with the camp’s own vehicles, never the guests’, so I suppose it’s okay.

Anyway, all this is by way of a long-winded pre-amble. Get to the point, I hear you say.

Well, I was in the camp kitchen this morning washing the breakfast dishes, and through an opening in the wall I could see the TV set in the adjoining lounge. The TV was on and although I couldn’t hear what was being said, I could see that the scenes were from Christchurch.

Because we’d been on the road for several days, it was the first TV coverage I had seen of the massacre and its aftermath. I assumed it was one of the local channels recapping last week’s events, but then I saw the Al Jazeera logo at the bottom of the screen.

I saw armed police in the streets of Christchurch. I saw Jacinda Ardern speaking with her familiar signer for the deaf at her side. I saw floral tributes to the dead piled high under a banner that said, among other things, “Kia Kaha” – stay strong.

Overseas viewers must have wondered what it meant. We know, of course, and on seeing those words on the screen I felt a sudden surge of emotion. It was a forceful reminder that this terrible thing had happened right here.

I was reminded of something my wife said on the night of the shootings as we sat in our caravan listening to radio news coverage. “This is something that happens somewhere else,” she said.

Well, New Zealand has become that somewhere else. It’s no longer possible to delude ourselves that we are somehow magically insulated against the evil we see reported nightly on the TV news from other places.

For 48 hours, we were the centre of world attention, and not in a good way. On the night following the massacre I streamed Newshour from the BBC World Service. It was almost entirely taken up by Christchurch.

Now call me perverse if you like, but I felt proud listening to the BBC’s coverage. Proud at the actions of my fellow New Zealanders who saw what was happening on Deans Avenue and stopped to help the victims, regardless of threats to their own safety. Proud at the many New Zealanders interviewed by the BBC who insisted they wouldn’t allow this catastrophe to change the way we are. And proud, too, that so many commentators overseas shared our own astonishment that this could happen in New Zealand, of all places – a country universally acknowledged as tolerant, open and respectful of human rights.

It’s not the terrible event that defines us, but how we respond.

And as I look out over Long Bay, where the tide is starting to come in and the boaties are backing their trailers down the launching ramp and the demented one-eyed border collie has just tried to round up a flock of seagulls, I’m reminded again of what we value about living in New Zealand and why so many people from troubled countries want to come here. It takes a lot more than a single terrible event to change that.

Random thoughts on Waitangi Day

(First published in the Manawatu Standard, the Nelson Mail and Stuff.co.nz on February 6.)

■ The British were relatively humane, enlightened colonisers, certainly by comparison with other colonial powers such as Belgium, Spain, Portugal and France. New Zealand was colonised not by force of arms but by agreement with the established inhabitants. In that respect we are rare, if not unique.

■ As far as we can tell, the Treaty of Waitangi was signed with honourable intentions and genuine respect for Maori. It was only later that settler greed for land and general Pakeha villainy caused things to turn dirty. But it should be acknowledged that some Maori tribes were dispossessed of their lands by their own chiefs.

■ Colonisation had a devastating effect on Maori health and society and is increasingly blamed for problems which dog Maori today, such as educational under-achievement, unemployment and high imprisonment rates. But colonisation brought benefits too. Pre-European Maori life was hardly idyllic. Tribal warfare was a constant threat and slavery, violent death and cannibalism were endemic.

■ The Treaty can be seen in hindsight as a hopelessly insubstantial document on which to base the governance of a complex 21^st century country. Hastily written and even more hastily translated, the Treaty has strained to breaking point under the enormous weight placed on it. It doesn’t help that there were two versions, leaving the courts to come up with sometimes fanciful imaginings of what the signatories intended.

■ Unlike Australia, whose first white settlers were convicts, New Zealand was settled by people who came here of their own free will, looking for something better. This was probably just as true of the original Polynesian arrivals as it was of the Europeans who followed. My own family stories are typical: my father’s forebears left Denmark to get away from Prussian invaders and my mother’s left Ireland to escape poverty and repression. My wife’s parents were victims of Nazism who were rendered stateless by World War II and remained so until New Zealand accepted them in 1965.

■ As the debate over immigration threatens to become more rancorous, we need to remind ourselves that we were all - Maori included - once immigrants who were able to take advantage of what this country offered. Most New Zealanders probably welcome the more vibrant society that has resulted from increased immigration and cultural diversity, but it has the potential to become problematical if not handled carefully. The real issue is how to manage immigration without destabilising society and facilitating divisive demands for special treatment of select ethnic and religious groups.

■ We still don’t know nearly enough about our incredibly rich and colourful history. In fact we have two rich histories, one of which – pre-European Maori history – is overlooked altogether because Maori had no written language with which to record it. It survives only in oral story-telling.

■ Taika Waititi was justified last year in ticking Pakeha New Zealanders off for not bothering to pronounce Maori names properly. But does that make us a racist country, as he suggested? I don’t think so. The “racist” tag is greatly overplayed and too often used to close down legitimate discussion. There is racism in New Zealand, undoubtedly, but you can’t condemn a country as racist just because people persist with the pronunciations they’ve grown up with. “Racism” to me implies a belief that some races are intrinsically superior to others and that discriminatory treatment is therefore justified. I can’t see how lazy pronunciation, which is usually the product of a lifelong habit rather than any desire to demean or belittle Maori, crosses those thresholds.

■ New Zealand is a pragmatic, practical country that prefers to do what works rather than allow itself to be captured by ideology. Extremist causes almost never gain mainstream political traction. We thus tend to be spared the ugly and intolerant extremes of Left and Right that characterise politics in some other countries.

■ We’re also a small, intimate society with two degrees of separation, which means we can’t help bumping into each other in the street, the supermarket and airport lounges. It’s harder to hate people when you have to deal with them face-to-face as human beings. How many countries could put together a parliamentary rugby team with players from opposing parties, such as the one that’s playing against former rugby greats in a curtain-raiser to a pre-season Blues-Hurricanes match this weekend?

■ And finally, we have much to celebrate. We live in one of the world’s most civilised liberal democracies. Global surveys consistently rank us among the top 10 countries in the world on measurements such as freedom, human rights, quality of life, education, health and tolerance of difference. We’re not perfect, but we’re doing lots of things right. Happy Waitangi Day.

It's true then - the past is a foreign country

(First published in The Dominion Post and on Stuff.co.nz., January 24.)

I was enjoying a New Year drink with an old friend and discussing some of the things that have changed in our lifetime. Soon I found myself mentally making a list.

It’s a totally random, off-the-cuff list, compiled in an idle mood on a lazy day. It doesn’t purport to make a profound statement about the state of society. It’s just a reminder that, in the words of the author L P Hartley, the past is a foreign country where they do things differently.

For what it’s worth, here it is:

I remember paying mortgage interest rates of more than 20 percent.

I remember when a milkman delivered milk to a box at your gate, in glass bottles that you washed and returned for re-use.

I remember when the government went to inordinate lengths to prevent the pirate station Radio Hauraki from challenging the state broadcasting monopoly.

I remember when towns had stock routes so that mobs of sheep and herds of cattle could avoid the main street.

I remember when secondary schoolboys wore caps.

I remember standing (or not standing, depending on how rebellious I felt) for God Save the Queen at the movies, which we used to call the pictures or the flicks.

I remember railcars.

I remember when schoolkids were issued with Post Office Savings Bank books to encourage thrift.

I remember when most cars had three-speed transmissions operated by a gear lever mounted on the steering column.

I remember when every town had a dosing strip where dogs were tested for hydatids.

I remember the fathers of my school contemporaries dying in their 40s from heart attacks.

I remember when the New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation banned harmless protest songs.

I remember Peter Pan and Frosty Jack ice cream.

I remember when TV transmission started at 5pm and finished at 10.

I remember when there were only four women MPs.

I remember when the film censor decreed that the movie version of James Joyce’s Ulysses had to be shown at separate screenings for men and women.

I remember McWilliam’s Marque Vue and Montana Cold Duck.

I remember when the most popular meeting-place in Wellington was under the James Smith clock at the corner of Cuba and Manners Sts.

I remember when city council chief executives were called town clerks.

I remember Cona coffee.

I remember when the police drove black Humber Super Snipes.

I remember when Catholic and Protestant schoolkids exchanged religious taunts on their way to and from school.

I remember when people got their pay handed to them in cash, in little manila envelopes.

I remember when a try in rugby was worth three points.

I remember when a diagnosis of cancer was regarded as a virtual death sentence.

I remember when new cars didn’t come equipped with heaters or radios.

I remember bodgies, widgies, milk-bar cowboys and beatniks.

I remember when young men in country towns belonged to Jaycees.

I remember morning assemblies at my state secondary school where we sang English hymns and songs like There is a Tavern in the Town.

I remember when no Pakeha New Zealanders - and not many Maori either - had heard of Parihaka.

I remember when New Zealand Truth was the only paper that covered sex cases and was kept out of sight in respectable homes.

I remember when beer was sold in flagons.

I remember when union membership was compulsory.

I remember when The Flintstones was shown in prime time and everyone watched it because TV was a novelty and there was only one channel.

I remember when the first McDonald’s outlet opened and people thought it was weird that their burgers contained a slice of gherkin.

I remember when New Zealand shut down at weekends and there was no television or radio advertising on Sundays.

I remember when “mixed flatting” was frowned upon as improper.

I remember when travelling by air was an occasion for which people dressed in their best clothes.

I remember Suzy’s Coffee Lounge, the Casablanca, Roy’s hamburger joint, the Majestic Cabaret, the Bistro Bar and the Downtown Club.

I remember traffic cops.

I remember a time before bureaucrats decided it was unsafe for New Zealand kids to do early-morning paper rounds.

I remember when people fiercely resented being required to wear seat belts.

I remember when “coming out” was something respectable young ladies did at debutante balls.

I remember when there were TV reporters over the age of 40.

I remember when everyone in New Zealand recognised the names of the president of the Federation of Labour and the chairman of the Meat Board.

I remember when everyone smoked at work, then went to the pub and smoked some more.

Is society better now, or worse? To be honest, I can’t decide. It’s just different.

New Zealand: a bolthole for disillusioned liberals?

(First published in the Manawatu Standard and Nelson Mail, November 16.)

I see Richard Dawkins, celebrated scientist, atheist and author of The God Delusion, is talking up New Zealand as a possible bolthole for disillusioned liberal refugees from the northern hemisphere.

Dawkins thinks our little country suddenly looks very attractive following Britain’s exit from the European Union and Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential election.

He suggests New Zealand should seize the opportunity to lure great scientific and artistic minds from America and Britain – “talented, creative people desperate to escape the redneck bigotry of their home countries”.

I’m not entirely sure we should be flattered by Dawkins’ attention. He’s the personification of what is pretentiously termed a “public intellectual” – a towering figure to whom we lesser beings are supposed to look for enlightenment and moral guidance.

But I note that his intellect doesn’t stop him from resorting to simplistic, undergraduate name-calling. What he calls “redneck bigotry”, others would call democracy: ordinary people exercising their right to choose who will govern them.

Most of us accept the outcome of democratic votes even if we don’t always like it. But when voters make choices that people like Dawkins don’t approve of, their arrogance and intolerance is exposed for all to see.

He’s angry that “anti-intellectual voters” should have been allowed to wreak “catastrophe” in the world’s two largest English-speaking democracies. The unmistakeable sub-text here is that in the ideal political system, voting rights would be restricted to the right-thinking intellectual elite. People like Dawkins, in other words.

But never mind – he finds hope of redemption in our remote corner of the Pacific.

Dawkins regards New Zealand as a “deeply civilised” country that cares about the future of the planet, and suggests we should promote ourselves as the Athens of the modern world. Cue visions of a glorious, golden new realm where Trump would become just a nightmarish memory.

We’re on other people’s radar screens too. US Supreme Court judge Ruth Bader Ginsberg told the New York Times in July that she couldn’t contemplate America under a President Trump, adding with a rueful smile: “Now it’s time for us to move to New Zealand”.

The actor Billy Crystal is another who visualises New Zealand as a potential sanctuary. Asked for his reaction to Trump’s success on the campaign trail back in April, Crystal said he might consider buying a “nice little ranch” here.  

Of course they would be welcome, but it all suggests a rather idealised vision of New Zealand – one far removed from the reality of a country blighted by some of the same social and economic ills, albeit on a lesser scale, that afflict America and Britain. 

Still, the attention of such luminaries reminds us that we inhabit a very desirable little haven, safely distanced from the world’s pressure points and weeping sores.

Perhaps the most striking thing about Dawkins’ glowing assessment of New Zealand is that it conflicts sharply with the image we have of ourselves.

Day after day the media bombard us with gloomy reminders of all the things we imagine are wrong in God’s Own Country. The picture is of a nation permanently mired in crisis.

There’s a housing crisis and an inequality crisis. The health sector is struggling to cope, our rivers are shamefully polluted and our major cities need huge infrastructural investment.

Our prisons are bulging and we’re not doing anything meaningful to arrest climate change. Our native birds are in danger of extinction. The Maori language is dying and there’s a booze outlet on every corner. Children are going to school hungry and there’s an epidemic of morbid obesity.

I could go on, but you get the picture. Listen to Radio New Zealand’s Morning Report any day and you’re likely to hear a litany of grievances from agenda-pushers and interest groups clamouring for government action (which invariably means money) to ease their grievances.

If you’re easily taken in by alarmist propaganda (and many Morning Report listeners are, judging by the anxious emails they send in to the programme), you could easily get the impression that New Zealand is a country perpetually teetering on the brink of collapse.

It’s both ironic and amusing that it should take an anti-establishment figure like Dawkins, who's generally regarded as a hero of the Left because of his fierce denunciation of religion, to put things in perspective by reminding us how blessed we seem in the eyes of others. 

His sunny assessment is sharply at odds with that of the glass-half-empty New Zealand Left, but it lines up with other views. Only two weeks ago New Zealand topped the Legatum Institute’s worldwide prosperity index, which takes into account not only economic factors but also education, health, personal freedom and the environment. 

We scored especially highly for the strength of our society - a rating that could only have been enhanced by the way communities reacted to this week's earthquakes. 

Sure, there’s always a plethora of things we could be doing a lot better. But we have one of the world’s most stable democracies and we enjoy freedoms and a standard of living that much of the world’s population can only dream of.

We are a civilised, liberal and tolerant society. Dawkins got that bit right – although, speaking personally, I’m not sure our tolerance should extend to pompous, condescending intellectuals who don’t bother to conceal their disdain for people who disagree with them.  

Unfortunately, the migration door swings both ways

I’VE RECENTLY been reading a book by the English journalist A A Gill. The Golden Door is a book about America – a country that fascinates Gill, and in which he finds much to like.

Gill’s observations about immigration particularly resonated with me. Writing about the great wave of humanity that left Europe for America in the 19^th century, he cites some striking statistics.

Between 1800 and 1914, 30 million Europeans emigrated to the New World. If that doesn’t sound a big number, consider it in this context: Ireland lost one in four of its population, Sweden one in five. Five million Poles, four million Italians and three million Germans crossed the Atlantic.

As Gill points out, “all entrances on one stage are exits elsewhere”. While we tend to think of migration to America in terms of what that country gained, Gill reminds us that it represented an enormous human loss for Europe. Every departure was “a farewell, a sadness, a defeat”. The Irish would hold wakes so that they could mourn those leaving.

He writes movingly of the “gut-wrenching finality of separation”. Those departing would hug their mothers, drink a toast with friends, take a last look at the old house, pat the family dog, and leave. Very few would ever return.

Gill reminds us too that the people who left were usually the ones who could be spared least. “Like a biblical curse, the biblical land called the young and the strong from Europe: the adventurous, the clever and the skilled.”

There are clear parallels here with the New Zealand experience, because ours is an immigrant society too. We can’t be sure what motivated the Polynesian voyagers who first settled New Zealand; some suggest overcrowding on their home islands, depletion of food resources or warfare.

Others theorise that they may simply have been driven by an adventurous urge to discover and colonise new lands. But whatever the explanation, they were obviously looking for something better – and perhaps they too were the young and the strong, the risk-takers.

My own forebears were certainly not prepared to accept the status quo in the countries of their birth. On my mother’s side they were Irish Catholics, economically disadvantaged and politically powerless. On my father’s side, they were getting out of a country (Denmark) that had recently been invaded by the Prussian army.

Life in Europe held even less promise for my wife’s family. Her parents were forcibly transported from occupied Poland to Germany during the Second World War and put to work in an arms factory. At the war’s end there was nothing to go back to; their families had been wiped out and Poland had effectively been taken over by Stalin’s repressive Soviet Union. It took 20 years for them to find their way to a safe haven in New Zealand.

Every New Zealand family has its own immigration story to tell, but in every case someone made the risky decision to leave behind the known and familiar and take a chance on the other side of the world. It’s equally true of the many immigrants now arriving from Asia.

But what occurred to me, reading Gill’s book, is that in recent decades the pattern has also reversed itself.

New Zealand has experienced its own exodus. Just as our forebears left Europe for a better life and new opportunities, so, ironically, large numbers of our own children have left New Zealand for much the same reason.

Members of my generation have had to resign themselves to the likelihood that their offspring will end up making their future in another country. Even more ironically, many have gone back to the country their ancestors abandoned: Britain.

There are echoes here of the 19^th century experience in countries like Ireland. We too have lost many of our youngest and most talented. The crucial difference is that, thanks to cheap international air fares, we are spared the unimaginably painful experience of saying goodbye knowing we’ll probably never see them again.

My own situation is not unusual. Of our four children, three live overseas: two in Australia and one in California. Only two of our six grandchildren are growing up as New Zealanders. Many of my nieces and nephews, too, find life elsewhere more rewarding.

Will they eventually come back? We can only hope so.

When the subject comes up in conversation with my kids, certain themes emerge. Whatever attachment they feel to the country of their birth, life is economically more rewarding for them elsewhere and the opportunities are greater.

It’s an uncomfortable truth that New Zealand is a low-wage country. My children say they could possibly live with that, but what they can’t accept is the severe disjunction between wages and the cost of living here.

Alas, getting living expenses into line with wages, or vice-versa, is a challenge that seems to be beyond us.