Name: Why Everyone is Leaving New Zealand
Uploaded: 2025-11-11T07:48:15.000Z
Duration: 13 min 33 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

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This is New Zealand, genuinely one of the most beautiful countries in the world.

In addition to its picturesque landscapes, a lot of that beauty also comes down to the fact that it is extremely remote, so much so that it's left off a lot of global maps.

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And it's home to a relatively small population of just 5.3 million people.

These people enjoy a very high standard of living, good education, very stable government, good access to healthcare and a relatively egalitarian culture.

Now, while all of this may sound great on a tourism brochure, this it has had some unintuitive consequences on the national economy, an economy which was very unique to begin with.

What is happening is that Kiwis are seeing a country that probably looks like a dreamland to most of the rest of the world, and

they're leaving it from an already small population.

New Zealand has one of the highest rates of emigration anywhere in the world, with the bulk of them just making the short jump across here to Australia.

More than 10% of New Zealand's people currently live in Australia.

There are, in some cases, just as many people leaving per capita from New Zealand as there are from third world countries embroiled in active conflicts.

To make matters worse, the bulk of this exodus is made up of highly productive workers right at the start of their careers.

Now, the population is still growing, but

that has been fuelled largely by immigration to fill in the gaps left by the skilled workers who are leaving.

And that itself is creating other problems, only making this whole issue harder to address.

And then, on top of that, New Zealand is seeing the exact opposite problem coming the other way.

A certain group of Australians are flooding into New Zealand and doing what Australians do best.

So what makes New Zealand's economy so unique?

What are the issues causing so many Kiwis to leave New Zealand?

And finally, why has this trend been so hard to reverse?

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The link is in the Description New Zealand's economy is largely defined by the realities that it is quite small and extremely remote.

It has roughly the same total population as the city of Sydney just across the pond here in Australia.

And even here in Australia itself, we're not exactly known for our massive population, but

A curse in the sense that building globally competitive industries there is extremely difficult because almost anything that can be done in New Zealand can be done much cheaper, at a much larger scale and much closer to shipping lanes up in Asia.

This isn't just traditional heavy industries either.

Financial services are usually a key export of comparatively advanced regional nations like this.

But why would anyone go do their international banking in Auckland when there is Singapore, which is far closer physically to most commercial centres, but

also far more integrated into the global financial system for most business requirements.

Even if someone wanted financial services specifically for operations in this region, Sydney is right there with a more widely recognised currency and a bigger overall market.

What's more is that the political connections between Australia and New Zealand so close that practically anything an international business would want to do in New Zealand can be done from a base of operations in Australia.

This closeness is an extremely big deal, so do keep that in mind.

The point is though, the only industries operating in New Zealand are industries that need to be there.

Tourism, local finance, local services, some regional maritime operations.

They all play a role and it must be remembered that the population is tiny, so there isn't a need for a huge number of huge services.

But a closer look at the exact breakdown of these industries will shed some light on these problems.

New Zealand is one of the most agriculturally productive countries in the world, which is highly unusual for such an advanced economy.

The Channel Hoser Hoosa I dunno, the beaver dude did a great deep dive on this, so I don't want to repeat too much here, but

the point is that New Zealand has taken farming, which is typically an industry relied on by Lower income countries and used its incredibly fertile land, abundant water sources and modern technologies to produce valuable export commodities that are very competitive in the global economy.

Especially next door in Asia, which has a lot of mouths to feed.

Now this is great and all but most well educated city dwelling New Zealanders aren't exactly lining up to go and work on farms.

There aren't that many jobs there anyway.

Farms in New Zealand are some of the most valuable in the world per hectare because they are extremely fertile and because they're in the southern hemisphere, which means they can grow off season foods for the much larger markets in the northern hemisphere.

But when people are spending this much on their farmland, it only makes sense to also invest into the best equipment as well.

Which means most of these operations are highly mechanised and require relatively little human labour.

Well, the biggest industries in the country by far are all centred around housing.

Selling houses, renting houses, building houses, financing houses and, and

governing the selling, renting, building and financing of all of those houses all collectively make up about half of the country's entire economic output.

For starters, there is obviously just the cost of these houses.

When this much of the economy is dependent on playing past the parcel of land, it's perhaps unsurprising that this sparsely populated and very remote country has some of the most unaffordable real estate in the world.

Now, to be fair, the country has taken some steps to deflate this housing market, like banning foreign buyers from purchasing property.

By cutting off a source of demand for property, all other things being equal, prices should have fallen.

But in reality it didn't really do too much.

Before the ban, foreign buyers were only 3% of purchasers anyway.

And on top of that, it didn't stop the biggest source of foreign demand, which was Australians.

Because Australia and New Zealand really are so close, we have a lot of agreements where we will for the most part treat their people like our people and vice versa.

That means that the ban specifically did not include Australians, who were the largest foreign buyers in the first place.

People in Australia on average have a lot of money and something like a holiday house or even a retirement home in places like Queenstown or Auckland are extremely popular with wealthy Australians who want to live amongst beautiful sceneries without those sceneries actively trying to kill them.

Investing in New Zealand is particularly attractive as well, because even though their house prices are extremely high, they are still for the most part lower than major cities in Australia.

Oh, and on top of that it can be very tax efficient.

Home buyers need to pay something called stamp duty when investing in a property.

Here in Australia, this is a fee of roughly 3% of the home price paid upfront, which doesn't sound too bad, but

when a shack like this sells for $7 million, it does add up.

New Zealand doesn't have this upfront fee, making it an attractive alternative.

Of course, most demand comes from within the country and for what it's worth, prices have been falling over recent years, thanks to government policies that have largely made properties less tax efficient investing vehicles.

The changes themselves, just like the foreign investor ban, haven't actually been that huge.

But even the indication that the government wanted to do something about house prices was enough to take a lot of the exuberance out of the market.

Either way, prices are still a problem, more so here than most other countries around the world.

And this makes it seem like a pretty open and shut case, right?

Young Kiwis who can't afford to start a life in New Zealand are moving out to somewhere where they can.

The problem with that assumption is that more than half of them are moving out of the frying pan and into the fire that is Australia.

If they really did just want cheaper homes, this would not be the move.

What they're really after is opportunity.

The only industries in New Zealand are those that really have to be there.

Which means unless people want to work in agriculture or in jobs somehow connected to the local real estate market, there is just more opportunities in larger Australian cities.

More specialised professions naturally tend to gravitate towards larger commercial centres.

If someone wanted to work as a fine arts curator, or a high end researcher, or even just a senior manager, most of those jobs can't really be found in small country towns.

There just isn't enough demand to support those roles in smaller commercial centres.

So naturally they tend to shift towards big cities.

The thing that makes New Zealand so unique though is, is that the big cities all of these jobs are gravitating towards are in a different country.