Why Australia is ‘teacher heaven’ and these Kiwis won’t come back

Saturday, 13 June 2026

Joseph Lloyd almost tripled his salary when he moved to Western Australia as a 22-year-old. He has no plans to return to New Zealand.

Struggling to make ends meet as a primary teacher in Auckland, Joseph Lloyd turned to the internet.

“I put into Google, ‘where can I earn the most money as a teacher with two years' experience?’”

The results: Qatar, Kuwait, and remote Western Australia.

Nearly four years later, Lloyd, now 26, has made a life in Derby, population 3222. It’s a settlement so isolated that the nearest urban centre, Perth, itself known as the world’s most remote city, is a 24-hour drive away.

Originally from Christchurch, Lloyd graduated from Canterbury University in 2020. After 30 failed local job applications, he spread his net wider and jumped at the first job offer from a school in South Auckland.

But two years later, earning $58,000 and tired of living hand to mouth, he became one of the first to move to Western Australia under the state’s new international recruitment programme.

Everything was paid for: flights, shipping, a hotel until he found somewhere to live, and a AUD$10,000 (NZ$12,000) settling in allowance.

All told, Lloyd says his paycheck that first year was around AUD$135,000 ($NZ$163,000). Now in his fourth year, his salary sits around AUD$140,000 (NZ$169,000).

Joseph Lloyd and his dog Lance, a stray who moved in with him after some floods hit the district.

At Derby District High School, Lloyd has a professional development role: overseeing other teachers, guiding the school towards best practice.

It’s a role he might not have had access to in a metro area, but Derby’s teaching population is young and transient, made up of new graduates taking advantage of a government incentive that wipes their student debt after four years in a remote location.

Isolated and tiny, Derby has two supermarkets and a handful of shops. The largest building is a two-storey home.

“Red dirt everywhere, no clouds in the sky for six months of the year, birds you would have never seen or heard of before,” Lloyd said.

“It’s a little community that's made it work, 24 hours away from a city.”

Moving to Derby was a culture shock, and Lloyd planned to stay for two years. But he worked hard to integrate: running a boxing club, and driving local health programmes, which earned him a Young Community Citizen of the Year award this year.

“I’ve started to build something here, so it’d be hard to go.”

Lloyd has worked hard to integrate into the community, and his efforts were rewarded earlier this year with the Young Community Citizen of the Year award.

During weekends he heads out fishing and camping, trains in boxing and jujitsu, or plays video games. For a while, he ran a Dungeons & Dragons table: the only six nerdy guys for thousands of kilometres, he said.

He even has a dog, Lance, a stray who moved in with him after some floods three years ago.

“I don't feel that I'd be doing anything differently if I was in the city,” Lloyd said.

Although, he adds, he does miss the movies.

“I make the most when I go down to Perth. I go to a movie every night.”

Almost half of Derby’s population is Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, and the community had its challenges: poverty, health problems and students disengaged with learning.

“They’re awesome little kids who know so much about the world that’s around them, but the Western teaching system doesn’t always meet their needs.”

As well as his salary, Lloyd enjoys other perks: two annual flights a year to Perth, and subsidised rent and electricity, helpful when the temperature soars above 40C and his air conditioner is constantly running.

The landscape was striking and Lloyd often heads out camping and fishing.

Lloyd hasn’t concentrated on saving. He’s been busy travelling, and is about to embark on a master’s degree in education.

“Having the money to actually travel was something that was never an option to me teaching in New Zealand, so I've seized that.”

One day, he might make the move south, he said.

As for a return home? “Definitely not.”

Moving back would slice off a third of his salary, and a return to worse working conditions.

“When I was in New Zealand, I was doing the job of what feels like two people here in terms of hours and planning.”

Working in a remote settlement isn’t for everyone, but for those who can make it work, the benefits are significant, he said.

“As with any big move, it'll come with its challenges. But I haven't looked back. If it's within your means, and you can do with being away from your support system until you build a new one, I'd absolutely do it.”

Teaching in remote Australian communities comes with perks: free flights, housing and extra allowances.

Australian schools ‘propped up by New Zealanders’

A Seek.co.nz search revealed more than 4000 permanent or contract education listings in Australia. More than half of these were in Queensland or Victoria.

Switching that search to look for teaching positions in New Zealand showed 347 vacancies -- but scrolling through them, a significant number were from recruiters urging Kiwi teachers to instead look across the Tasman.

Meanwhile, on Education Gazette, where schools typically recruit, there were 685 vacancies across New Zealand.

Australia has always been a destination for Kiwis hoping to travel and save. But in the last few years, the pull has been stronger than ever, as Australian jurisdictions offer greater incentives in a bid to address its teacher shortage.

The shortfall had started to bite after the pandemic, as graduates looked at teaching conditions and salaries, found them wanting, and opted for other careers.

Lack of staffing had a knock-on effect on the existing teaching workforce, who reported being overworked, stressed, and considering leaving the profession. Last year, a review found Australia’s teacher shortages were among the worst in the OECD, especially in disadvantaged and remote schools.

In response, the government has poured money into training, recruitment and retention.

The Post requested figures from each of Australia’s states and territories. Not all came back with the information, but Queensland’s Department of Education said last year there were 472 Kiwi teachers registered with the state: a steep rise from 350 in 2023.

Kiwi teacher Alexis Crockett has spent the last couple of years teaching in remote Australian communities. She says she has no incentive to move back home.

South Australia’s Department for Education had 180 Kiwi teachers on its register, up from 166 in 2024.

Earlier this month, the Sydney Morning Herald reported that Victoria’s teacher workforce was now “propped up by an influx of New Zealanders”.

Since the beginning of 2023, 1732 New Zealand teachers had gained registration in Victoria, more than 10 times the number of teachers going in the other direction, the SMH reported.

The article noted that differences in pay and conditions between jurisdictions were fuelling competition for teachers.

Victoria's shortage was partly driven by locally trained teachers leaving for better-paid positions elsewhere in Australia, with about 38 teachers a week departing the state, the SMH said.

‘There’s so many possibilities here’

Alexis Crockett is also in Western Australia, but almost as far from Derby as it’s possible to get within the state: about 1800 kilometres to the south as the crow flies.

The 34-year-old qualified as a teacher in 2016, and spent seven years working in Wellington before deciding she was ready for something new.

“I decided to go on this adventure and ended up in the desert,” said Alexis Crockett, who taught in a desert community in remote Western Australia.

She moved to Byron Bay in New South Wales. It was “like living in a postcard”, but after a year, she got itchy feet.

“[I thought], Australia is a huge country: let’s see some more of it.”

She found a job working for an Indigenous-owned playgroup in the remote Western Australia desert, before teaching at a school within the same community, from kindergarten to high school age.

“I decided to go on this adventure and ended up in the desert.”

Having travelled before, Crockett didn’t experience much of a culture shock. She also has a master’s degree in indigenous studies, which gives her some insight into her work, and life in an Aboriginal community.

“You just have to be open to the fact that you don't know. To saying, ‘you know, and I don't know, can you show me?’

Crockett taught at a school in Jigalong. The 2016 Census estimated the population was around 333 people, of whom most were Aboriginal.

“Then you're going to be a lot more successful than if you're like, ‘well, I'm a teacher and I have a degree and I'm a worldly person, so I know what's going on here.’”

Crockett’s starting salary was “on the lower end of the pay scale”, around AUD$115,000. (NZ$139,000). On top of this, she had bonuses, and free housing. In her last role, this was a three-bedroom home.

“You just have to be willing to live in the middle of nowhere in it,” she said.

Crockett found ways to keep busy in Jigalong, which has a population of just over 300. She’s “really into craft”, and taught herself to knit. Her community had a pool, and she became a swimmer. She dabbled in photography, and took part in online projects.

At the moment, Crockett is between permanent jobs. She’s house sitting in Esperance, in the southern part of the state, and doing some relief teaching.

She has plenty of options: travel, more remote teaching, a move back east for the ease of New Zealand travel links, or working with the Flying Squad, which flies educators to remote communities for short-term teaching positions.

“There's so many more possibilities here for things to do, whereas in New Zealand it feels more limited around flexible options.”

NZEI primary teacher representative Barbara Curran said if she was a bit younger, she’d be tempted by an Australian teaching position too.

Crockett misses her family, the mountains and the sea, and her first stop when she visits is Burger Fuel. And she craves purple kumara: she can only find the orange variety.

But none of these things were enough to pull her back permanently.

“There's just no incentive for me to come back, financially or career-wise. It would be a huge step back.”

‘A little soul-destroying’

While the number of Kiwis heading over the Tasman is high, the number of Australian teachers making the inverse move is low.

Figures from the Ministry of Education show that just 345 Australian-registered teachers gained registration here between 2024 and 2026.

Barb Curran, a principal and NZEI’s primary teacher representative, is not surprised to hear that the flow of teachers crossing the Tasman is all but one way.

This was worrying, she added, given that many New Zealand schools were finding it difficult to recruit.

“Every time a teacher goes overseas, that's one less here.”

The Ministry of Education recently forecasted a national shortfall of 710 secondary teachers this year and 510 next year.

While the forecast showed a surplus of around 500 primary teachers, this was contrary to what Curran saw.

“The lived reality of the principals I know that are advertising for jobs, they are not getting New Zealand-trained applicants.”

Curran said morale up and down the country was low.

“Seeing colleagues head over to places to earn significantly more money… [and seeing teachers] earning more as a beginning teacher than I do, as someone with 20-plus years experience, is a little soul-destroying.”

Was Curran tempted to make the move?

With a mortgage, and one international move behind her already, probably not, she said.

“If I were 22 or 23, just qualified and looking at my chances of being able to live a solid middle class life with a house a family, I might be looking overseas.”