A viral lament about our ‘broken’ country has reignited debate over whether staying put is still worth it, writes Catherine McGregor in today’s extract from The Bulletin.
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A feel-bad column that hit a nerve
Verity Johnson’s Monday morning Stuff column gave bleak expression to a mood many New Zealanders have been experiencing for a while. “I guarantee that not one person, of the 201 leaving NZ today, is thinking of coming back,” she wrote. “They’re looking back over their shoulder, at their families waving them goodbye, and thinking: Thank God, I made it out.” Her piece argues the old promise of a decent, if unflashy, NZ life has gone: the post-Covid recovery is weak, consumer confidence is stuck in a rut, and faith that the government can fix it is ebbing away.
After charting the drift to Australia for higher wages and lower costs, Johnson lands on a broader breach of the social contract: “New Zealand has always made a promise to its people … You’ll never get the sex appeal of Italy or the history of Britain or the riches of Dubai. But you’ll get a good crack at a comfortable life. Except now you don’t.”
Are things really that dire?
In response, Ben Kepes warns that the collapse narrative can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. “There’s something theatrical about doom-saying,” he writes in The Press (paywalled). “Call it pessimism-as-entertainment. Say the country is broken, nothing works, that to stay is dumb and you’ll get attention. The more dramatic, the better.”
His refreshingly hopeful column argues that while housing, inequality and the cost of living are genuine problems, over-the-top doomerism like Johnson’s only makes things worse: venting might feel righteous, but it can blind us to the real possibility of progress. “The story of New Zealand isn’t just one of decay,” Kepes writes. “It’s also one of repair, of persistent effort, of the quotidian labour of love. So yes, it’s okay to complain. It’s healthy and necessary. But complaining as though the country is dead? That’s not okay.”
When did you last think about jumping the ditch?
That bleak national mood is backed up with polling. In December, a Sunday Star-Times / Freshwater poll (paywalled) found more than one in three New Zealanders had seriously considered moving to Australia in the previous year. The draw isn’t only pay packets – it’s the promise of scale, variety and a livelier cultural diet. As one 30-year-old weighing a move put it: “When I moved to Auckland, it was because it was a big city with things going on. But now, everything I liked about Auckland, a city in Australia is doing it better.”
As for bringing people back, The Post’s Henry Cooke – himself recently returned from London – argues the government is in something of a bind, given that the trans-Tasman safety valve is quietly helping the local labour market. “Unemployment is already at 5.2%,” he writes. “How much higher would it be if no young jobless man could jump on a flight to Queensland?”
A deeper, global disenchantment
More worrying than short-term migration flows is the longer-term mood captured by Ipsos last year. The headline finding summed it up: three in five respondents said New Zealand society is in decline and the country is broken. The survey detected not just malaise but actual anger, finding majority agreement for statements like “traditional parties and politicians don’t care about people like me”, alongside a desire for a “strong leader” to either “take the country back from the rich and powerful” or “break the rules” to get things done.
Crucially, this is part of a global pattern of distrust and polarisation, Newsroom’s Marc Daalder notes. Yet Australians – perhaps reflecting the very features attracting New Zealanders across the Tasman – were less negative than respondents here. “Others, like the United Kingdom, were even more pessimistic about the state of affairs in their nations,” writes Daalder. So yes, things feel grim – but somewhere else, it’s even grimmer.
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