People leave New Zealand in record numbers as economy bites

lemme in@lemm.ee to World News@lemmy.world – 131 points –
reuters.com

People are leaving New Zealand in record numbers as unemployment rises, interest rates remain high and economic growth is anaemic, government statistics show.

Data released by Statistics New Zealand on Tuesday showed that 131,200 people departed New Zealand in the year ended June 2024, provisionally the highest on record for an annual period. Around a third of these were headed to Australia.

While net migration, the number of those arriving minus those leaving, remains at high levels, economists also expect this to wane as the number of foreign nationals wanting to move to New Zealand falls due to the softer economy.

The data showed of those departing 80,174 were citizens, which was almost double the numbers seen leaving prior to the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Record number of people are leaving because things are so bad!!!!

Wait, record number of people are arriving because things are worse elsewhere making net migration in positive? Let's downplay that because predictions show that MIGHT slow down and it hurts our story about how bad things are.

Based on all of the pictures I have seen of how beautiful New Zealand is, I volunteer to replace any of them.

If you wanna live as a monk in the country side go for it. For all other practical purposes, you probably wont like it as much as you think. People dont leave their country for no reason.

Just to play devils advocate though.. awesome people and awesome country.

I've always wondered if I'd rather live there and be poor honestly than live here in Australia (which is basically at least 50% redneck at this point)

It was so weird as an American to find out that country music is huge in Australia.

It reminds me of how Mexican music was (and maybe still is) really popular in the Balkans because they were so closed off from most of the world when they were united as Yugoslavia.

Why do you find it surprising that we like country music in Australia?

Because it's a very American form of music. In fact, a lot of it involves a bunch of jingoistic patriotic bullshit.

Some does. A lot does even, but not the best country music, not by a long shot.

"Your flag decal won't get you into heaven anymore"

Edit:

Figured I should share some tunes:

Cruel world - Willie Nelson for rdr2

Angel from Montgomery - John Prine, cover by Daniel Donato is also excellent

Boombox, hogkill blues, 1922 blues - all by Charlie Parr, all excellent. Hogkill blues is abt a strike in which union workers were killed by counter-strikers.

Prison Trilogy - Joan Baez - makes reference to the term wetback to refer to an immigrant ("his back was wet, but he thought he could get, some things to start a life") but is otherwise an excellent song abt the fucked up American prison system

Lots of love, hope you enjoy at least one of these!!

You should look into Australian country music, it's different from American. American country music is still popular here but we've had a rich history of country music that is our own unique style.

Australians consume a lot of American content, but not necessarily content about America.

I get that. It just seemed to me, at least before I found that out, that it was a uniquely American form of music.

Like imagine if you were from Mongolia, and someone was like, "throat-singing? We love that shit in Paraguay!" You'd probably think like I did about country music.

I guess so.

I think you can safely assume that most American culture is imported into Australia, the good and the bad.

Some ass-hats are trying to ban books about non-binary sexuality from our library. I had thought that was uniquely American.

People are leaving New Zealand in record numbers as unemployment rises, interest rates remain high and economic growth is anaemic

AFAIK they also have a somewhat severe housing crisis. No idea whether it's actually worse than e.g. in Australia, though - who doesn't have a housing crisis these days?

China has a different flavor? 🤷‍♂️

Think maybe as humans we just forgot how to build houses or something.

we just forgot how to build houses or something.

Or something, yep. We financialized housing.

  • Instead of building houses to live in, we turned them into investment vehicles to justify the mortgages and expense of owning/maintaining them.
  • A house is now a pension, or a retirement savings account; primarily a place for capital to live (people living there isn't necessary).
  • As such, housing value needs to continuously grow and anything that threatens that value growth is evil.
  • Since houses are now a place to park money and the growth in value is always supported, increasing amounts of money are moved into housing. Individuals justify larger and larger mortgages and investors start to move money into housing from other productive forms of investment.
  • Industries grow and are created to move money into, and extract money from, housing; investors also invest in these industries.
  • As housing becomes more and more expensive, it outpaces the growth in wages of homeowners; increasingly in successive years those who would have been homeowners in previous years can only afford to be renters or own smaller and smaller homes.
  • International investment and institutional investment, speculators and criminals looking to launder money get interested, since the value of housing has exploded so much it now looks attractive to these players; home values increase further as this additional capital comes into the market.
  • primarily land, but also raw materials and labour become more expensive as a direct or indirect result of the inflation of housing market; increasingly homeowners are priced out of new builds, and investors are necessary to finance the building of new housing.
  • because investors are financing new housing, it is built for them; cheap, small units that can be disposed of more easily and allow capital to be spread more effectively across a number of houses instead of lumped into just in one.
  • the humans living in the houses increasingly become renters, useful to investors only as a means of paying some of their costs via rent; protections for renters threaten the value of the investment, so rental protections are blocked or eroded.
  • in the end, houses are built but by investors, for investors, and in a manner that ensures the value of current investments cannot meaningfully decline.

We know how to build houses, but we built a system that builds houses for investors to house money, and not for people to house themselves.

China has a different flavor? 🤷‍♂️

?

Think maybe as humans we just forgot how to build houses or something.

There's some legitimate issues (e.g. investors buying up housing and trying to squeeze out as much short-term profit as possible, increasing prices for raw materials), but the main issue seems to be that most governments refuse to take effective measures for whatever reason. IDK, maybe they're just all strapped for cash after the recent pandemic.

Yeah, housing is fucked. We have ignored any infrastructure investment in ...40 years?

Education is fucked

Health is fucked

Tourism got fucked by COVID

That pretty much leaves farmers and tenants

Are any of their old slots up for grabs? I work remote, get paid in a currency that's not currently eating itself, and I can spend my weekend helping with the rat eradication if that helps with the stamp of approval.

When I see headlines like this about colonised places I like to dream that the indigenous people get their land back and eventually wave goodbye to the last settler/colonizer.

I understand and, in principle, agree with the sentiment, but I feel like "indigenous" implies people who've been there since prehistory and Aotearoa was uninhabited by humans until about 1320 CE. The "indigenous" Maori only beat the Europeans there by a few hundred years.

Like Vin Diesel said, "winning is winning," but still, we're not exactly talking about the kind of margin people like the Aboriginal Australians or the Native Americans had.

The Aztec Empire was founded in 1428 by people who migrated from the north to the Valley of Mexico.

By your reasoning, the Aztecs should not be counted as the indigenous people of the Valley of Mexico. They certainly are considered as such.

Similarly, the Inuit in Greenland only got there after the Vikings. The Vikings died out, the Inuit stayed. Again, they are considered indigenous.

In all three cases- the Aztecs, the Inuit and the Maori, they had developed unique cultures. In the case of the Aztecs and the Maori, Europeans then arrived and destroyed those cultures.

I mean if you really want to be technical, the only place humans are indigenous is the East African Rift Valley.

I would also suggest you look at the second definition here:

The Aztec Empire was founded in 1428 by people who migrated from the north to the Valley of Mexico.

By your reasoning, the Aztecs should not be counted as the indigenous people of the Valley of Mexico. They certainly are considered as such.

There are two ways of looking at your argument:

  1. Consider the Aztecs narrowly as a fully separate and distinct people. In that case, no, they don't count as "indigenous" because there were other peoples (e.g. Teotihuacan people and Toltecs) there before them.

  2. Consider the Aztecs broadly, meaning you're really talking about the Nahua people as a whole. Then yes, they do count as "indigenous," but were also there way before 1428.

You don't get to have it both ways, with Schrödinger's "indigenous" being simultaneously the first and not arriving until 1428.

Your argument is like claiming that the Romans were the "indigenous" people of central Italy and have been there since 753 BCE and not a minute before, because (for some reason) the Latins and Sabines (and the Italic tribes they descended from) don't count.

Here's a question for you: who are the "indigenous" people of the Falkland Islands? Is it Europeans, or nobody?

Did you read the definition?

Yes. Answer the question.

If you read the definition, the question was answered before you asked it.

I want you to say it. There are two possibilities, and the conversation can't move forward until I know which one you think it is. Quit dancing around the issue.

Why you think I have any reason to do what you demand is beyond me.

Believe it or not, I'm not actually trying to troll you here -- despite, at this point, you pissing me off with your cutesy obstinance.

You know what? Fuck it. I'll just get to the point despite your refusal to cooperate:

I can only assume you're thinking, but refusing to answer, "no, the European-descended people on the Falkland Islands don't count as indigenous (definition 2) because they were 'colonists' and didn't arrive before themselves."

In that case, here's the real point I was trying to get at: what definition of "colonist" applies to those Europeans but not also the Polynesians, without relying on some kind of European exceptionalism? In what way was the Polynesian expansion across the Pacific not an act of colonization, just like what the Europeans were doing in the Falklands? If the implication is that the ability to "colonize" is exclusively an Age-of-Discovery-European thing, or that Polynesians somehow lacked the capacity to "colonize" places because of some "noble savage" bullshit, I'm not buying it!

In other words, I object to that line of thinking not because I'm trying to diminish the Maori's claim to Aotearoa, but because making Europeans exceptional sells the Polynesians short.

Now, there is another connotation of "colonist:" the kind that is starkly contrasted with "indigenous" in the sense that they're newcomers who arrive at a place that already has people living there and subjugate them while claiming the "new" territory for the country they came from. In that context, we can definitely talk about how the Europeans who showed up in Aotearoa were "colonists" and the existing Maori population were their "indigenous" victims. That's definitely a definition that differentiates between the two groups!

...Except that going by that meaning, the Europeans who settled the Falklands couldn't have been "colonists" because there wasn't anybody there to subjugate before they showed up. So does that mean European-descended Falkland Islanders do count as "indigenous" (definition 2) after all, since they were the ones who inhabited the place from the earliest times?

The conclusion I have to draw is this: either both the Polynesian-descended Maori in Aotearoa and the European-descended Falkland Islanders are "indigenous," or neither of them are.

If you disagree, I would -- genuinely! -- love to know why.

I can only assume you’re thinking, but refusing to answer, “no, the European-descended people on the Falkland Islands don’t count as indigenous (definition 2) because they were ‘colonists’ and didn’t arrive before themselves.”

Well that's a silly assumption since it literally goes against the definition.

You've got to be fucking kidding me. That's it? That's all you're gonna say? After dicking me around and forcing me to spend a bunch of time trying to anticipate your half of the conversation (at least if I wanted to get a conclusion to it), you're just going to mock me for guessing wrong?!

Goddamnit, this is why I wanted you to just give me a straight answer in the first place!

You're a mod -- ban yourself for violating rule 5 or 6 or something! Fuck!

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I don't think anyone alive is a coloniser.

The only people that live in new Zealand are locals and immigrants. Even if you removed all the immigrants it would still be full of full blooded white kiwis that have never lived anywhere else and potentially never even met a relative that has lived anywhere else. They are a New Zealander.

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