OPINION: In the early 1870s my ancestors left the north west coast of Denmark to seek their fortune in gold.
Being newly married, illiterate and largely unemployed, they had no real prospects and nothing to lose.
Anne Katrine was pregnant and gave birth on the long sea journey to Dunedin.
They settled first in Macetown, and when the gold ran out, they moved to Arrowtown.
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They made a home, raised a family, but never again saw the rugged rolling hills of Nordjylland, or made the fortune they risked everything to find.
Flash forward 120 years, and we were faced with similar choices, only we were both degree educated and in professional work.
Interest rates in the 1980s were above 20%, and the rigid structures of our professions meant that many years would pass before either of us attained seniority.
Faced with nothing to lose, we decided to do the reverse and head to Europe in search of the same kind of opportunities that my ancestors had journeyed in New Zealand for so many years previously.
We called it the Big OE, like everyone else, but looking back now, I don’t think we really had any intention of coming back. That didn’t stop us lying to our parents and saying that we would be back in a year or two.
And somewhere in the last 30 plus years we have found a home that isn’t New Zealand, but isn’t really anywhere else either.
We’ve tried twice to go back home and settle down.
We have advanced degrees, world leading expertise in education, and we have lived successfully in eight countries, and worked in four different education systems.
But back in New Zealand, that seems to count for nothing. In fact, it appears to count against you.
Our experience, and that of many of our expat colleagues, is that professions in New Zealand tend to discriminate against those with overseas expertise. Perhaps we are a threat, perhaps we will encourage others to leave, or perhaps we’ll rock their very comfortable status quo.
It was always our intention to return to New Zealand and live out a self-funded retirement, but Covid has changed that.
Even after being away for over 30 years, it is difficult to describe what it feels like to be denied entry to your home country.
That passport with its wonderful silver fern on that front that has served you so faithfully, suddenly seems to mean nothing.
And for us it wasn’t even very bad.
We could live and work in a country that dealt successfully with the pandemic and had no real urgent need to return to New Zealand.
But to read the day in and day out traumatic experiences of New Zealanders who couldn’t get back and the heartless way the system treated Kiwis needing to return, has made us think differently about Aotearoa.
We fully understand every time something like this is published, it is met with a barrage of responses suggesting we should stay away and that New Zealand doesn’t really need us. But with all due respect, this attitude is the nub of the problem.
New Zealand is so small and far away, and it seems to be daily falling behind the rest of the world in so many professions and trades, that for its very survival it needs Kiwis who have been overseas and want to return.
And yet there’s this damn Kiwi parochialism that says that those that leave are traitors and don’t have anything to offer.
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