Is the grass really greener? The reality of Kiwis chasing the Aussie dream

Sunday, 31 May 2026

Marcus Kowalczyk booked his flight to Australia six days before he left. His mum wasn’t happy. He didn’t have a job or a flat lined up.

“I literally thought the grass would be greener,” the 22-year-old Wellington communications and marketing graduate said. “I thought I’d come over and I’d get an interview straight away. But I haven’t.”

Eight weeks after leaving in early April, Kowalczyk is still living in a hostel in Brisbane — rotating between seven and 14 people to a room, preparing for job interviews in shared bathrooms, unable to unpack his bags. He’s casting his net wide, applying for roles across Brisbane, the Gold Coast and Sydney. But while he’s had a couple of interviews in the past week, nothing has come of it yet.

“I told myself when I moved over — 90 days. I’m lucky enough that it’s so close and I don’t need a visa. But if I haven’t found anything within 90 days, that’s probably a sign.”

He had a job at home — years spent working his way up at the same organisation while studying, recently stepping into a management role. But “it wasn’t really fulfilling, to say the least.”

He had spent over a year trying to break into where he really wanted to be - communications and marketing after graduating from the University of Canterbury. Despite more than 200 applications across Wellington, Christchurch and Auckland, not a single interview.

“Even the most basic sort of entry level jobs I wasn’t even getting a shot at,” he said. “All the ones that you graduate for — fresh out of uni, two years plus experience required. It was kind of like, how do you graduate from university with experience?”

He described the experience as “so discouraging”. So he followed the masses, and left.

The story sounds familiar. Liz McLean, a 22-year-old marine biology, ecology and biodiversity graduate from Victoria University, had done everything by the book. She graduated, completed a six-month internship in her hometown, Hamilton, and exhausted her options at home before deciding to go.

She lined up a retail job at Rebel Sport in Sydney before she left — a buffer, she thought, while she found work in her field. She understood it was a competitive one, dominated by long-tenured professionals with few new intakes. But she had experience, good grades and grit.

The retail buffer lasted 12 months.

“Everyone says the job opportunities are better [in Australia], so I took their word for it,” she said. “And I regret taking their word for it.”

Over 100 applications. Constant ghosting. Up to 500 people competing for a single role. She broadened her search — from ecologist roles she had studied for into anything that used the skills she had built, like environmental engineering.

McLean almost gave up. She’d booked a refundable flight home and accepted a place in a postgraduate programme back in New Zealand.

Then in one week, she got three job offers - two in Sydney, one in New Zealand.

“It literally went from zero to 100. I was so happy. I was like, thank God.”

In hindsight, she wouldn’t change anything. Her new job pays double what the New Zealand role would’ve, she said.

The regret wasn’t about leaving — it was about going without doing her research first. Even in retail, she was earning more than she had during her New Zealand internship.

Left behind at home

When McLean left for Sydney in early 2024, the New Zealand youth job market was at one of its worst points in decades.

At the time, Infometrics chief economist Brad Olsen was telling young New Zealanders the situation wasn’t their fault. Nationwide unemployment among 15 to 24-year-olds had hit 16% — one of only three major peaks in modern New Zealand history alongside the early 1990s and the Global Financial Crisis. The number of jobs advertised was down significantly from two years prior, applications per role had tripled in some areas, and employers were leaning on experience that young graduates simply didn’t have yet.

“If you’re a young person out there who can’t find a job: it’s not you, it’s them,” Olsen said.

New Zealand recorded a net migration loss of 30,000 people to Australia in 2024 — the largest for a calendar year since 2012 — with young adults aged 20 to 39 making up 58% of departures (and 51% of departures to all countries).

When Stats NZ released these figures, acting Prime Minister David Seymour said the high number of New Zealanders moving to Australia was part of the pandemic hangover. He said he was confident that, as time went on, fewer people would choose to leave New Zealand.

The March 2025 quarter saw 12,145 New Zealand citizens leave for Australia, one of the highest single quarters since the 2012 peak, reigniting the charged public debate about whether New Zealand is experiencing a “brain drain”.

New research from Koi Tū Centre for Informed Futures argues the public and political narratives are grounded in limited data and selective interpretation — noting that while annual New Zealand citizen departures rose from around 26,000 to 64,000 between 2021 and 2025, migration patterns have historically been cyclical and the current trends are not unprecedented.

“Youth mobility is a prominent part of Kiwi culture, and high mobility amongst young adults is not, on its own, a cause for concern,” the report said. “If those departing New Zealand elect to return home after some time working or studying abroad, they can bring with them new skills, experiences, ideas and networks.”

But the economic logic is hard to argue with. Australia’s unemployment rate has just increased to 4.5%, from 4.3% - against New Zealand’s 5.3%. For young people the divide is starker still: youth unemployment in New Zealand sits at 15%, compared to 11% across the Tasman.

For a brief moment earlier this year, the numbers suggested the answer might be shifting.

Signs of change — then the fuel crisis

By early May, BNZ Chief Economist Mike Jones had been cautiously optimistic. Job advertisements in New Zealand had risen for eight consecutive months, and the ratio of New Zealand to Australian job ads had been nudging higher. Departures were starting to slow. He’d started hearing anecdotally something new — people who had looked into making the move and decided against it.

“Which is not something that we were hearing two years ago,” he said. “Where once it was a no-brainer — I think that’s changing.”

Then the fuel crisis hit. Job ads fell in both March and April, and that positive momentum stalled and was now at risk. “It’s going to take some time for that to turn around — and probably will take longer now that we’ve got this disruption to the economy from what we’ve seen in the Iranian situation.”

The disruption had affected Australia too — but from a much stronger starting point.

“People still leaving [for Australia], but in reduced numbers — it may well just pause in terms of that slow shift down,” Jones said.

For Kowalczyk, the timing felt particularly cruel. He had spent over a year watching the New Zealand market fail to deliver before deciding the only option was to leave. When he landed in Brisbane, he found a market that was better — but not by as much as he had hoped.

“To start with it was very much the same,” he said. “It was hard because you hear about the success stories. You don’t hear about the people that found it hard.”

What he eventually learned — from a recruiter who contacted him on LinkedIn — was that the Australian marketing and communications sector had shed a significant number of workers in recent months. He was competing not just against other graduates, but against experienced professionals who had been made redundant.

“I was like, holy moly, that would have been nice to know six weeks ago,” he said.

The experience prompted him to pivot — broadening his search beyond job titles, looking at startup companies where internal growth was more likely, thinking about the firm rather than just the role.

The transition trap

Even setting aside the economic headwinds, the move is rarely as seamless as people expect.

Dee Powis, a Christchurch-raised HR consultant based in Brisbane who works across both markets, said the mismatch between expectation and reality was something she encountered constantly.

“I think a lot of New Zealanders come to Australia expecting a seamless transition because the countries are culturally similar, but the employment reality is often very different,” she said. “Australia can absolutely offer higher wages and more opportunity in certain sectors, but it is not a guaranteed reset button for people struggling to find work in New Zealand.”

Qualifications and licences often didn’t transfer the way people expected. Construction workers with years of New Zealand experience still needed White Cards, site-specific tickets and local standards knowledge. Firefighters started from the bottom regardless of rank or tenure. HR professionals found the regulatory requirements were entirely different.

“We regularly see experienced workers arrive thinking their background alone will carry them into equivalent roles, only to find they need Australian certifications, local compliance tickets, industry registrations, or local experience before employers will even consider them,” Dee said.

For Kowalczyk, the practical challenges went beyond the job market itself. Without a job, he couldn’t secure a flat. Without a flat, some employers were less willing to progress his application — particularly for hybrid roles requiring him to work from home.

“A lot of the flats, they want to know that you’ve got a job for the income,” he said. “And then a lot of the time with some of these jobs, they’ll ask you where you’re based — and when you say I’m in a hostel at the moment, they’re also a little bit like, oh.”

He had found some relief through water polo, earning him a small income as a coach and a discounted rate at the hostel due to connections.

The cost of living, however, remained a constant pressure. McLean described paying $800 Australian a week for a shared one-bedroom apartment in Sydney in her first year — almost $1000 New Zealand dollars. Once she moved into a shared flat, that dropped to around $300 each. Groceries ran to $100-150 a week. Public transport, at least, was affordable.

Powis said the people who succeeded were almost always those who went in with realistic expectations — either with qualifications that transferred cleanly, or prepared to take a sideways step while rebuilding their foundations.

“The people who struggle most are usually those who arrive expecting Australia to automatically recognise their previous career at the same level from day one, and aren’t prepared to take a sideways step in the interim while they build their foundations here.”

She said there was still strong demand in warehousing, logistics, transport, aged care and disability support — sectors often underestimated as a starting point while people got properly certified for their intended field.

Worth it?

For McLean, despite the hard year, the answer was yes.

“Just do it,” she said, to young Kiwis considering the move. “Realistically, at the end of the day, you can move home if it doesn’t work out. It will be tough if you don’t get where you want to be to begin with — but time passes and opportunities come up.”

Kowalczyk isn’t quite there yet. But he said the communication alone — the way Australian employers actually got back to you, explained the process, told you where you stood — was already a revelation after a year of being ghosted at home.

He’s had a couple of promising interviews, and while his only job offer turned out to be telemarketing dressed up as marketing consulting, he’s getting closer.

“At home you wouldn't hear anything, and then maybe two months later I’d get an email — I forgot about that job, and I’m getting a rejection email from January in April,” he said. “Over here they actually get back to you either quite quickly if you haven’t been successful, or they’ll follow up and ask for more information.”

He’s staying put — for now.

“I’m still going to give it 90 days,” he said. “That’s what I keep telling myself.”