Does the Government actually want to fix the brain drain?
Wednesday, 17 September 2025
Henry Cooke is deputy political editor for The Post.
OPINION: I moved back to New Zealand this month.
Whether you can really describe this as any kind of brain gain depends on your opinion of journalists, but I am certainly something of a rarity.
Just 25,000 Kiwis moved home in the year to June – while 47,000 left. That’s 129 Kiwis a day heading off to potentially never come back. Some number of them will be highly trained professionals we need in our hospitals and schools, who the taxpayer has helped to train. And some number will be school leavers who are very aware that their chance of a job is better found elsewhere.
None of this is really new. Brain drains and gains across the Tasman have been part of the Kiwi experience from day dot. Gold could show up on either side of the Tasman and send a lot of people onto ships. We have never really existed as two formal countries with closed off labour markets for any large amount of time – New Zealand only created its own citizenship in 1948, and for a long while you didn’t need a passport to visit Australia.
But familiarity does not make it hurt any less politically. We only have elections every three years, but those 129 Kiwis are voting with their feet every day – making a bet that Australia or elsewhere holds a better future than our shaky isles. On the macro level the move definitely makes sense, especially for the majority of leavers who head to Australia – where unemployment is lower, pay is better, and Taylor Swift still tours.
Yet each and every decision is personal.
It would be hard to make the argument that my own move to London was economically driven. I earned less, spent more, and barely saved a penny. I was far from alone among Kiwis in London in their early 30s, who often had decent professional jobs in New Zealand that were not easily transferable to London. Lawyers and accountants could earn the big pounds, but a lot of others were surprised to find just how low British wages can be.
There is an economic element to the UK’s draw – competition. An incredibly competitive airline market makes it cheaper to fly all over Europe every few weeks than have a night out in London. And a very competitive supermarket sector – combined with VAT exemption on a lot of food – makes a London night in downright affordable.
Australia has a slightly better competition story than New Zealand, with marginally more supermarkets and two strong airlines rather than one. But it is not consumer choice that drives people to Australia, it is a job market where you can make dramatically more than you do here, especially if you have no tertiary education or a lot of it, and are comfortable working on the occasional Sunday.
This strength of the Aussie worker illuminates the problem the Government would have in trying to immediately stem the flow of workers across the Tasman. It’s already killed the Fair Pay Agreements the last Government brought in, which were modelled on Australia’s modern awards system, and the direction of travel is entirely against further worker protections.
It shows more appetite on reforms to force competition, but these are slow wars of attrition against entrenched incumbents, not quick wins.
It’s also unclear in the short term that keeping that many Kiwis home would necessarily help the Government. Unemployment is already at 5.2% – how much higher would it be if no young jobless man could jump on a flight to Queensland? We might wish that they could just find a decent job back home instead, but with about 12.9% of our 15-24-year-olds not in education, employment, or training, that simply won’t always be the case. And it’s not like New Zealand is actually shrinking – net migration remains positive.
In the longer term, losing this many Kiwis is a damning indictment on our national project. But there is a bit of rebalancing that this emptying out allows, a silver lining to the doom and gloom. With so many Kiwis leaving and the economy in such a state, the price of housing has seriously moderated. This was a huge factor in my decision to return to New Zealand, and as prices soar in Australia it could hit others too.
That alongside all the things no other country will ever replicate: The tūī waking you up in the morning, the cousins and siblings down the road, the can of reduced cream combined with onion soup powder. In all, a sense of home – a home one can afford that actually feels like one. It’s not the easiest public policy goal, but hey, it got me back.