Living and Working in New Zealand
David Hampshire
Living and Working in New Zealand, first published in 1999 and now in its 5th edition, is the best-selling and most comprehensive book available about daily life – and is essential reading for newcomers. What's it really like Living and Working in New Zealand? Not surprisingly, there's more to life than mountains, mud pools and the mighty All Blacks. This book is guaranteed to hasten your introduction to the New Zealand way of life, irrespective of whether you’re planning to stay for a few months or indefinitely. Adjusting to day-to day-life in New Zealand just got a whole lot simpler!
Download the first 25 pages FREE now (including the Table of Contents), and see for yourself the wealth of priceless information this book contains (including finding a job in New Zealand, New Zealand employment conditions, New Zealand permits & visas, New Zealand immigration and New Zealand customs)! It's packed with comprehensive, up-to-date, accurate information, facts and figures, and 'insider’ tips, all written and presented in the ‘easy to read and understand’ style for which Survival Books are famous. Our books will save you weeks or months of research, answer hundreds of questions – including many you hadn’t even thought of – and help you avoid problems and save money!
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Other guides for New Zealand
Extracts from the book…
Finding a Job
The main problem facing those wishing to work in New Zealand isn’t usually finding a job, but meeting the stringent immigration requirements, particularly concerning qualifications and English language proficiency (see Chapter 3). Although New Zealand is one of the few countries in the world that is keen to attract new workers from abroad – most countries positively discourage them – this doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily easy to find a job. New Zealand has a relatively small labour market and there’s strong competition for the best paid jobs, although in certain industries where skilled staff are in short supply, it’s possible to pick and choose from an abundance of vacancies (this is, however, the exception).
In common with most other developed countries, New Zealand has suffered the ravages of unemployment in recent decades and its economy went into a deep recession during the early ’90s, which resulted in the wholesale closure of businesses throughout the country. In 1992, unemployment reached a peak of around 11 per cent, the worst on record in modern time. In the late ’90s, however, the economy picked up, and in late 2001 unemployment was around 5 per cent and fell to its lowest ever recorded level – 3.6 per cent – in February 2005. It has fluctuated in the last few years, but remained at 3.6 per cent in June 2007 – the fifth lowest in the 27 OECD countries.
Anyone arriving in New Zealand looking for a job should expect to find stiff competition from the locals. The New Zealand workforce is well educated and trained, and highly motivated; the unemployment benefit system helps – you don’t get the dole if you don’t seek work. You shouldn’t expect employers to favour you simply because you’ve uprooted yourself and your family and travelled halfway round the world (in fact the opposite may be the case). Even well qualified local graduates can no longer expect to walk into a job, as used to be the case, and as many as half of all graduates don’t have a job commensurate with their qualifications a year after graduation.
Bear in mind that many young (and not so young) people leave the country each year in search of better employment opportunities overseas, mainly in Australia, the UK and the USA. If many New Zealanders cannot find a good job in their own country, it’s bound to be more difficult for foreigners.
However, although some people have difficulty finding employment, there are relatively few stories of failure and only a small number of new migrants with good skills fail to find a job; the unemployment rate among skilled migrants is lower than the national average, which itself is low. Most people who are prepared to work hard and adapt to the New Zealand way of doing things find that they do better in their job or career than they would at home.
If you don’t have a job arranged before your arrival, it’s essential to have a plan of action; do your homework before arrival and, if necessary, be prepared to change your plans as you go along.
Permits & Visas
Before making any plans to live or work in New Zealand, you must ensure that you have a valid passport and the appropriate permit or visa. Nationals of Australia can live and work in New Zealand with no more official documentation than their passport. Most other nationalities must apply for permission to stay in New Zealand, either temporarily or permanently, before their arrival. New Zealand makes a distinction between those staying temporarily, who must apply for a visa or permit, and those wishing to stay permanently, who must apply for residence.
Although New Zealand is a land of immigrants (some 85 per cent of its population are descended from Europeans, most of whom came to New Zealand within the last 150 years) immigration is a contentious issue. Some people wish to increase it (they claim that the South Island could continue to absorb immigrants almost indefinitely) while others wish to cut it sharply (they obviously wish to keep New Zealand’s many delights to themselves). This can result in confusing messages being sent to prospective migrants.
In fact, New Zealand currently has a negative balance of migration, i.e. emigration is higher than immigration, and immigrants of the ‘right type’ are welcomed, indeed encouraged: in the words of the official literature, people who ‘will contribute to New Zealand by bringing valuable skills or qualifications to the country, setting up a business or making a financial investment’. New Zealanders generally feel that there’s a need to diversify the country’s skills in order to maintain international competitiveness, and one of the ways of doing this is to attract skilled immigrants.
If you plan to migrate to New Zealand, you should ‘intend to live there for a long time, be able to adapt to New Zealand’s lifestyle, obey New Zealand’s laws and have no previous criminal convictions’. In the past, New Zealand took a rather lax approach to immigration, but procedures have become more rigorous in recent years, and illegal immigration and overstaying is taken much more seriously than previously. The country sets an annual immigration quota, which was around 47,000 in 2008.
Immigration is a complex subject and the rules are constantly changing. You shouldn’t base any decisions or actions on the information contained in this book without confirming it with an official and reliable source, such as the New Zealand Immigration Service (see below) or The Emigration Group (see inside the front and back covers). Residence regulations are taken seriously by the New Zealand authorities, and if your application isn’t in order it can result in rejection.
The authority responsible for controlling entry to New Zealand is the New Zealand Immigration Service (NZIS, also called Immigration New Zealand, www.immigration.govt.nz) or Te Ratonga Manene in Maori, a service of the Department of Labour. A list of NZIS offices, branches and agencies in New Zealand and worldwide can be found on the website. New Zealand embassies, consulates and high commissions (see Appendix A for a list) also provide information on immigration.
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PRICE: £14.95
PUBLICATION: October 2009
EDITION: 5th
PAGES: 344
BINDING: paperback
SIZE: 230mm x 155mm
COLOUR PHOTOS: 150+
