Did we emigrate to New Zealand or Maoriland?
Today’s Dom Post talks about new signs being erected at the entrance to the Kapiti Coast region. It seems they will have “Macron” above the “a”, which makes it a long vowel rather than a short vowel. So it would be pronounced Car-Pity rather than Ka-Piti which is how most people say it.
The addition of the Macron is happening in other areas as well, and from what I can tell is designed to improve pronunciation and more accurately reflect the Maori language.
So where is the problem?
Well, i guess there will always be people who object to anyone not speaking English. I personally feel it is the one language everyone should know, even if it isn’t their first language, and yo would be at a disadvantage of you didn’t. But the crux of this particular issue is that a Mr Warriner believes Kapiti with a macron actually spells Cabbage.
Well, that I leave to the linguists!
What I find troubling though is this quote:
Last year Paraparaumu resident Martin Warriner forced the council to back down over its use of macrons in “Kapiti” in legal documents, including his personalised rates invoice.
Mr Warriner, an English immigrant, insisted he had emigrated to New Zealand, not to “Maoriland”.
Now yes, he like myself migrated to a place called New Zealand. How does that in anyway detract from the fact that New Zealand has two official languages, one of the being Te Reo Maori? We emigrated to a place that is Bi-Lingual, and has a history and culture that is sometimes different from the one we left behind. While I certainly do not (and never will) buy into the notion that only Maori in New Zealand have a “culture”, I refuse to buy into the same rubbish that says their culture has no meaning.
I am proud of my heritage and culture – why shouldnt any Maori be equally proud of theirs? Sure they have thier tricky spots, and less pleasant moments in history – but so do we all.
And language is a huge part of that. I do sometimes feel it goes to far – particularly here, where my understanding is that there was no written language until the European settlers arrived, so there may not be a “right spelling”. But honestly – this is really no different that being in Wales. We tried to ban Welsh as a language – but we grew up eventually and now Wales is covered in Bi-Lingual signs. I personally find that quite wonderful.
Christmas by the pool with chilled mulled wine.
This year – for the first time, the run-up to Christmas here in NZ actually felt a bit Christmassy. I have no idea why: maybe I’ve just been here long enough now that it feels a bit less odd; maybe its becuase this is the first time we don’t have immigration worries hanging over our heads and I know without a doubt we are staying.
Either way,it all felt a bit more real and relaxed.
Rather than embrace the way most Kiwis do Christmas, we have more just altered some of our family traditions to take into account the fact its absolutely scorching hot and we need the air con on max.
Kiwi Christmas dinner is more about hams and salads than turkey and trimmings. As none of us are really that fussed about a ham, it seems a bit pointless to cook it and eat it. So we have turkey and trimmings – at about 6pm when its cool enough to sit out on the patio and gaze at the view. Lunch was a rather old fashioned prawn cocktail – but with the addition of some Crays – given to us by one of our neighbors in exchange from some old pink-batts we are replacing.
See – we can do this Kiwi lark!
And while waiting for the turkey to cook, we basically lounged by the pool, relaxed and chilled.
Oh – and the mulled wine. I discovered last year that mulled wine (a favorite of mine from years at uni spent at medieval banquets) tastes absolutely delicious if you make it it advance and stick it in the fridge for a few hours. Its a great drink to go with a Christmas dinner out on the patio.
Followed by a bit more lounging round the pool, letting dinner settle before eventually managing some black forest trifle for pudding.
There are certainly worse ways to spend the day.
Now its boxing day – and another of our new traditions – off to the beach.
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Expat Kiwis in Australia are having problems.
It really isn’t just Brits emigrating to New Zealand that struggle to make ends meet sometimes. Kiwi’s crossing the Tasman (which for them is pretty much like Europeans being able to live throughout Europe) are finding that the grass is not always greener. Personally having lived in NZ for a while now, I can’t say I really see the draw of moving to Aussie, but hey.
One of the issues that some are finding is that they can’t get benefits in their country. What shocks me is that they thought they would be allowed to. Especially given the stink the mere thought of immigrants to New Zealand bludging benefits causes here. But it seems having gone in search of better wages and living conditions, and not finding the work needed to get it – some Kiwis are resorting to begging.
[Sallie Army] says they seem to be getting a misleading message about opportunities in Australia.
“They come with this understanding from somewhere that it’s easy to get cheap rental accommodation and employment,” he said.
“When they get here they find that that’s definitely not the case and we’ve had most of that 40 turn up at our centre in really difficult circumstances.”
A spokesman for the Department of Immigration said as long as the New Zealand citizens were not in Australia illegally, the department had no stance on the issue
Very helpful of the Immigration Dept there I think.
I also imagine there is probably a time after which you would be eligible for benefits – much as in New Zealand it depends on the type of visa, and length of time in the country.
I think the lesson here if the is one is that emigrating doesn’t always improve your life, and in these financial times, it doesn’t really pay to emigrate to a new country without a job, income and home in place.
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Will you have enough to live on?
Filed under: Hubby's Views, Jobs & Work, Life in New Zealand
Following up on Avalons suggestion that I find something interesting to say about the LISNZ. We’ve blogged previously about an Immigration report talking on salaries and standards of living for migrants. So I’ll try and compare the information there with what LISNZ is saying.
What do we find?
Median wages are ‘up’ to $23.49 per hour. That’s $48,860 per year. While the Immigration report says on average Kiwi’s earn $10k – $15k more than migrants to do the same work. So Kiwi’s in the same median job will actually earn $58k – $63k per year. An 18% pay differential, which as we see every year when they compare salaries for male & female employee’s is “unacceptable and must be fixed!”
{as an aside, one item that is identified is that the average Pacific Islander is on an average hourly rate of $14.95, while the average for skilled migrants as a whole is $28.09 – consistent with the observation in a previous post about general inequality.}
If a kiwi is earning $10k more than you and you’re already earning $120k, it may not be too much of an issue. At that level of salary, you’re being paid heavily for your skills & experience - not so much to be a person occupying a specific role that ‘anyone’ could do. So direct comparisons are more difficult. Down at the $50k level an extra $10k for a Kiwi to push the same pile of papers round an office is huge.
Perhaps this links with one of the other highlights, that 70% of migrants had enough or more than enough money to meet their everyday needs.
Implying that 30% of migrants don’t have enough money 
The interesting breakdown of stats here is that of those who had enough money initially, one in three (1/3) of them found they didn’t have enough money by year three. Which is after both the primary migrant or skilled principle & their spouse (sorry for the verbiage, that’s what they call us!) have seen a 15% increase in wages! i.e. up to the $48k average per person. On the plus side, half of those who originally didn’t have enough money did feel after three years that they did now have enough money.
While this is of course talking averages, I’m not sure what this is saying about how migrants are coping financially in practice. Either when they get here or three years later. Migrants are more likely to state that they don’t earn enough three years down the line compared to the first six months. When on average we earn more after three years. IS this because migrants are spending capital initially to support their new life? Which has run out by year three? Is it because the “shine” has worn off? Is it because in the first interview – you don’t want to say anything that might offend your new country?
Or it could be the cost of mortgages. 52% of migrants after year 3 own their own home, yet we also know that many Kiwi’s spend more than 30% of their after tax income on accommodation. With rents being roughly half the cost of a mortgage on the same property, having less money and being less satisfied may just be part of having a mortgage!
Unfortunately – theres no just no way to tell as the survey doesn’t ask why people think they don’t have enough money.
The level of ‘satisfaction’ with life in NZ drops between the first year and third year, while the overall number is within statistical accuracy, the number of very satisfied migrants drops 11%, to 35%. This may be as simple as the allure of a new life waning or your life three years in no longer being ‘new’. This also appears to correlate with a decrease in the sense of safety people feel, down 9% to 76%.
Now, both satisfaction and safety are undefined and somewhat arbitrary measures. I may not be satisfied this week if I’d only read the headlines about LAQC’s and felt we were about to sell the family silver to make ends meet. However, this may correlate with people feeling they don’t have enough money to live on. So back to mortgages again perhaps?
(Avalon still gets peeved with headlines in the news here banging on about how we have low interest rates. It’s 7-8% – that’s not low – its a bloody rip-off.)
The split of where people live remains pretty similar, 50% in Auckland, 30% elsewhere on the North Island & 20% on South Island. Although the only noticeable drift was that more people (as a percentage) move to Auckland by year three, than move away from Auckland. Not unsurprising and I know of numerous people in Wellington who have moved up to Auckland even in just the last six months.
So did we learn anything?
Whatever people may think of lifestyle advantages for moving to NZ, 30% of migrants don’t have enough money to live on. That’s something which is easy to measure & quantify. While satisfaction & safety, less easy to measure, also go down with time. This is good to know.
I was at an entirely unrelated education day the other week where the key point of which was to give people an insight into how things ‘really are’, so they can have more realistic expectations about how difficult things may be, prepare better and make a more informed decision before they make life changing choices.
Hopefully people will be better informed as a result of these surveys.
Hopefully Immigration & immigration agents will communicate this information to people.
Until that happens, we’ll keep telling it like it is.
When is your New Life no longer your “New” life?
I was browsing through some my Blogroll yesterday, and left a comment on the Domestic Executive Blog:
One of the best things about my new life here (which really after 5 and a half years I ought to stop calling my “new” life) is that I am NOT busy all the time. I can say to people – I’m flexible – when’s good for you – when we need to meet up. But I’ve also had to learn to say No when people ask me for favours. Because I found I was spending a lot of time “working” for people for free, and then not having the time to enjoy not working.
As you can see – while I was writing it – I suddenly wondered if I could any longer claim that this was my “New Life”.
At what point are you really no longer a Migrant or an Ex-pat, but someone who lives in New Zealand?
I reckon it might be when you stop complaining about the things that are different here, and start complaining about the things that other Kiwi’s complain about. Which are often the same things as it happens.
Maybe it’s when the novelty wears off. Which in my case it mostly has – but not entirely. I think there will always be moments when I think “Wow! I get to live here??? Really???”.
Either way – it’s not really my own personal “New Life” anymore – it’s just a better version of my old life.
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Me and the MX5: The Finale
Filed under: Cost of living, General Budgeting, Life in New Zealand
Well, let’s just say at this point that Motors: Mazda: MX5 has been listed as a favorite on my Trade Me account as long as I have had a Trade Me account. This is basically becuase when I first started getting into Property Investing, I happened to pass by the Mazda garage in Wellington (as you do – honestly its on the route to Moore Wilsons). And I thought I would pop in to look at what they had in the showroom – so that I could build a “Vision Board” of where I wanted the investing to take us.
And lo: they had this really swanky new Dark Purple (so dark its almost black), shiny MX5 that was just screaming at me to buy it.
I was in Wuv.
Slight sticking point – it was $50,000.
And it was brand new – which means as soon as you drive it out the dealership its worth a lot less than you paid for it. Not great odds for anyone planning on making squillions in the property game. Besides – didn’t have $50,000 sitting around burning a hole in my pocket. But dammit – thats the car I wanted, so it went on the dream board, and I have been keeping an eye out on Trade me for 2nd hand ones. One came up a while back, but still with a price tag of $35,000 which is still too much for me.
Ho Hum. Of course now that I need to buy a new car, the swanky purple one isn’t available – at any price, but I have been watching and planning. I was hoping to be able to spend about $20,000 but in the end the pennies just weren’t there. So I decided to buy a cheaper version – and I can always spray it when I have some more money.
2nd hand MX5′s can be had for between $3,000 and $45,000 – so I thought I’d better be at the lower end. I test drove a few in the 8-10k range, but in the end decided I wanted an Automatic. Basically because most cars over here are automatics, all ours were, and I’ve just got used to them. Besides – my original 2 MX5′s were as well.
On Friday last week, I called a guy in Levin who was selling an 1999 MX5, automatic, British racing green (no pop up headlights). Asking price $7995. A quick price check said that was very reasonable – I looked at one a year older for $11K, and one a year younger at $14k. We drove over to take it for a spin, and I loved it! It was in good nick (needs a good clean inside), but the roof is sound, it drove well and everything worked. Experience says theres not likely to be a huge amount that needs fixing – they are not cars that are run by complicated computers so they tend not to be expensive to fix. And the big expense which was a new Cam Belt had already been done and there was a service bill to show it.
All it took was a call to the bank manager, who had been warned this might be coming, and she put the payment through straight away. The guy was comfortable enough from talking to me to let me take the car straight away, and within 10 minutes I finally had my long sought after dream: an MX5.
We then drove a little north to Foxton Beach, grabbed fish and chips from Mr Grumpy’s and coffee from the Simply Balmy Cafe and had a late lunch at the beach sitting in my new car with the hood down. I couldn’t stop grinning.
In fact – I still haven’t stopped grinning every time i get in the car.
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Me and the MX5: Part2
Filed under: Cost of living, Getting to New Zealand, Life in New Zealand
So we arrived in New Zealand, and oddly enough, as these things tend to pan out – I did not end up buying a new car straight away. Mostly this was because we started out living in Wellington City, right in the middle of the CBD and could walk almost everywhere. And as we were fainting with shock over the true cost of living, we decided that being sensible {shudder} we would leave the expense till we needed it.
I even on occasion succumbed to using Public Transport {Shudders}.
We made the most of it, there was a good bus service to Eastbourne and Days bay, or we could take the ferry over and get breakfast at the cafe and bum on the beach. But it was awkward for food shopping, because we weren’t as free to shop around. And lets face it – its a right pain in the patootie when you have to lug carrier bags full of food across town!
But then of course we decided to buy a house in the Wairarapa, and couldn’t put off buying a car any longer. Hubby would need it to get to work, even if he was using the train, and where were buying – will – there wasn’t a Tescos within walking distance. Nope – for country living – a car is a necessity.
So – MX5 it was then.
Ah nope!
Dammit but we needed a “sensible car” {Shudders}.
We ended up buying a “Station Wagon” which just sounds so hideous to me. Estate Car is so much more “English”. There were a number of reasons for this. Its was big, comfy, and very very fast. The fact that it was black, had blacked out windows and black lights glinting blackly on a black background also helped.
It was also only $9000, though we did have to spend another few $$$ on it afterwards. This was also at the time that my family were coming over for their first 6 months trip, and we figured it was big enough to fit all 5 of us plus a lot of luggage, which saved us a considerable amount of hassle and expense on getting them from Auckland to their new home, as we were going to take a few days holiday to do the trip and see some sights as well.
So that was that – still no MX5, all the money for a car spent on a fast, black, but decidedly non-convertible “sensible” car.
That was 5 years ago….
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Me and the MX5: Part1
In a previous life – I went through a divorce. And as many people do, I went out and spoiled myself afterwards with a completely unsensible and frivolous spending spree and bought a convertible. So about 11 years ago I bought my first wonderful British Racing Green MX5 – with pop-up headlights.
I had so much fun.
Then as luck would not have it – a bumble bee spoiled all my fun, by stinging a young lad in the arm while he was hurtling round a corner in the Forest of Dean, and he drove right in to me.
Which hurt. A lot.
So that was a write off, but the insurance paid out, and I went straight back to the dealer I had bought it from, and bought another one. That was my second British Racing Green MX5 – with pop-up headlights.
I had some laughs with that – as it had a disturbing habit of spinning wildly out of control at the most inconvenient moments – like just as I was going round roundabouts, and ending up facing the wrong way. So as this was just as me and new hubby were getting married and buggering off to NZ for 5 weeks on honeymoon, we dropped it back to the specialist dealer, and asked him to try and figure what was wrong.
When we got back – on a stupidly early flight into Heathrow, we detoured to Ilford to pick up the car. Apparently no one could replicate the madcap spinning – but they changed the wheels anyway, twiddled with the suspension, and prayed a bit. Thankfully – that seemed to do the trick, and I didn’t die mangled in a spinning car.
Of course at this point – we decided emigrating to NZ would be laugh.
Well, I wasn’t going to give up my lovely car, so started looking at shipping costs. Most companies were looking at charging about the same, and basically we were looking at hiring a 40ft container instead of a 20ft container, and boxing the car in.
At which point the gits at LTNZ (Land Transport New Zealand) threw a bureaucratic spanner in the wheels: we were not allowed to import the car becuase it didn’t have a Frontal Impact Standard Pass because it was 2 years too old.
But – I thought – the car obviously passed a frontal impact test in as much as a Transit Van driving at speed frontally impacted my last MX5 and I didn’t end up squished on the road. How much more frontal impact can you get than that????
Well – we reckoned this was those economic scams designed to stop scummy migrants from not spending more of their hard earned cash in New Zealand setting up their new lives.
Bah Humbug!
So I had to sell it.
When the guy came to buy it – I couldn’t watch as he drove it away. It was a few weeks before we were leaving – and I was gutted to be saying goodbye to my car. I swore I would buy another one as soon as we got to New Zealand….
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Moving to the city: not as easy as it sounds.
So we are becoming “Trendy City Folk” with an apartment in the big city and a county pile to escape to at the weekend.
I’d be turning in my grave if I had one.
On the plus side – we started with the country pile so we don’t have to work up to it, but still!
Now we actually own an apartment in the City, but that is rented out with really good tenants, and would actually cost us a small fortune to live in. So we are continue to keep that rented, and have rented another apartment ourselves in the same block. As much as I am not a city person – I have to say I do love the apartment itself. The building lets it down, and I am going to have to have words with the body corporate about what is going with the on site Gym and pool – I real selling point for me – as its a disgrace.
But – I’ve slept really well the couple of nights we have stayed there so far, we have a proper kitchen (cooker so clean it definitely wasn’t used by the previous tenant – not unusual), and space for a separate office. And our stonkingly large TV and surround sound system.
It could definitely be worse.
Our biggest issue was actually organizing the removal. We used Crown Relocations, who we recommend for the emigration move – they were brilliant. However shifting from the Wairarapa to Wellington with a fraction of the stuff we hauled half way round the world was much more tricky. It took hubby a lot of sorting out, and I believe at the final count he had to confirm our starting address, final address and access no less than 6 times. They have to paid in advance, but didn’t get the invoice to us till midday the day before. I had tp get the bank manager to set up the payment, and then send a confirmtion email, but the lady at Crown had gone home by then. Thankfully there was an out of office email which gave details of someone else to send the confirmation to, and he then called to confirm we were in fact moving.
All to get to wellington!
So we moved in - Crown arrived with our furniture, and i promptly left to have a coffee with a friend of mine, just round the corner from the apartment. City living has its benefits after all – I may as well make the most of them!
We topped off the evening with a couple of friends round and a bottle of wine.
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An amusing reply
Mum and dad recently sent out a “we have been here a year” email to their friends back in the UK.
This was a reply to that email:
No Clotted Cream
No Scones
No Gold Top
No Frozen Veg
15 miles to the nearest shop
No proper Weetabix
Good bread though for Dad, but he cant eat it.
Prices going up
VAT on food.
Dismal weather
Tragic deaths.
No bloody wonder you enjoyed the English elections????
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