New Zealand wants migrant money, but not their help. A comment left about E2Nz.org at trademe.co.nz link http://www.trademe.co.nz/Community/MessageBoard/Messages.aspx?id=1577544&p=2&topic=5
You may be an intending migrant and heard that New Zealand is a great place to live and is crying out for someone with your skills. You’ve visited Immigration New Zealand’s web site and found, to your delight, that your skills are in high demand – there’s a shortage of people like you!
Eager and willing to help out such a great country you lay out a few thousand dollars in visa charges, put your home on the market and spend tens of thousands more shipping everything over to New Zealand. Money well spent, you tell yourself. This is an investment in your family’s future.
When you arrive you quickly realise you made a mistake. New Zealand’s working practices are parochial and archaic. Your overseas experience is held in disdain because it wasn’t gained in New Zealand. This is a “great country” and people “like it the way it is.”
You ask yourself “why is there a skills shortage then? Why did you invite me here?”
You suffer a drop in living standards, your kids stand still at school and are bored, they’re bullied, they hate rugby. Your home is overpriced, riddled with damp and under heated. Your salary disappears too quickly on goods and services that are frighteningly expensive, you live frugally.
Despite watching every cent you struggle to make ends meet, was it ever this hard back home? You watch your life savings rapidly draining away. You look at your kids and wonder what sort of future they’ll have in this country.
But you console yourself. The scenery is amazing. The people are so laid back.
You push down those feelings that you have probably made the worst decision of your life and silently start looking at job ads from overseas again. Then your bank statement arrives and that sickening feeling rolls over you: you can’t afford to move again. You’re stuck in New Zealand for the next few years and are going to have to make the most of it.
Then you find this site and realise there is hope after all. There are thousands of people feeling exactly the same as you, and they’re not all migrants.
When people tell you to go back and “fix up your own s..t hole” if you don’t like New Zealand, pause for a moment and smile. Say “actually I came to fix up yours but found it is beyond saving. Good luck with living here, as soon as I can I will be leaving”.
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What’s it like to live in New Zealand? Kiwis and migrants speak their minds.
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E2NZ.org 
In New Zealand to get a job, its about who you know, seen it when my parents tried to get a job in Pak N Save and KiwiRail formerly Toll and Tranz Rail
I am going to spell it out, in New Zealand, to get a job or even minimal wage job its “about who you know”
I am very disappointed that after moving to Auckland from Christchurch after 10 years, it was still so difficult to get a job.( after all I have the national anthem of NZ “Do you have NZ experience and cam you be a good fit to the team although you have no qualifications and no experience ? Meaning will you always play ball with a imcompetent , parochial and backward management ALL the time ?
I get the feeling Auckland is a separate country from Christchurch . WHy not call it Republic of Auckland and Republic of Canterbury then?
Even getting a job in Christchurch itself( although I did get some jobs) was more difficult that squeezing blood from a rock . My degrees and experience from Australia do not matter although NZQA assured me Australian qualifications are at least equal to that of NZ and I should have no problem getting a job in NZ. In fact each region in NZ is very xenophobic not only to foreigners but even towards people from other regions coming to take their jobs, Shocking insular, myopic, parochial minds.
NZ should call itself Planet New Zealand and each region in NZ should be made separate countries. In these ways, foreigners and those who move from region to region will not be so upset they cannot get jobs.
This one article most closely exemplifies my personal experience.
I had not come to NZ thinking that I was here to “fix their sh!t”, but when I looked at what was here and what I could help improve, there were limitless opportunities, or so I thought. Come to find out, nobody is interested in finding out anything about; work ethic, high production, improving efficiency, any other way of doing same tasks even if they are cost/time saving…
If the status is not maintained, kiwis can be very slow to take up new methods and ideas [even if they have been proved elsewhere]. So, your “value” to NZ is NOT in your overseas experience, because they don’t trust it. This is [probably] the foremost reason that “kiwi” experience is the only experience that is valued. There seems to be a national pride involved in the way they do things, even if they are parochial, archaic, and could be improved upon.
I had been very careful to teach and explain various methods [in my trade, to apprentices under my training] and had generally had the same reaction from them, which was “why don’t we do it like that here?” When I had showed them both methods [kiwi way and US way] the method preferred was most times NOT the kiwi way. But as soon as anybody else [higher up on the food chain] got wind of how I was performing my work [regardless of outcome], it was criticized as WWINZ, even if it did work and work well. You are fighting a losing battle UNLESS you are willing to step back in time and do things their way, even if that way is not the best way. Submit or suffer the consequences.
Some migrants stick it out through the racism they face,
BUT
They’ll advise their children that things will probably get worse so they need to move on from those that not only “don’t appreciate them” but “will abuse them” is what I read from this excerpt:
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/entertainment/news/article.cfm?c_id=1501119&objectid=10526600
…
As a foreign-trained doctor, Sharad Paul battled to get his own practice and it was only through sheer determination – or pig-headedness, he admits – that he stayed in New Zealand. He’s adamant he won’t be encouraging his daughter to follow in the family career – politics, greed and jealousy have marred the medical profession for him.
Born in England, Paul was 5 when his parents returned to India to be medical missionaries. It was that selfless work that inspired him then and still does today. He came to New Zealand in 1991 with a guaranteed job as a plastic surgeon registrar at a regional hospital but on arrival discovered the position was gone.
“Until I landed, they probably didn’t think I was Indian, with the surname Paul, born in England,” he laughs. “But I never take no for an answer, so rather than quit and say I’d failed, it made me more determined to stay here.”
Wanting more time to write, as well as the skills to do medical mission work as his parents had, he trained as a GP in Auckland and the Bay of Plenty.
“There was some sort of medical council assessment that said I couldn’t communicate in English very well. It’s always been my first language and I’m a writer of English, for God’s sake. Some people may have been broken by that, but each of these things made me even more determined to succeed,” he says.
Hi everyone, New Zealand does not want professionally trained, experienced workers to emigrate to NZ. Despite what their propaganda media will tell you, they really just want your hard earned money from overseas. You will spend a large amount of money emigrating to NZ & spend a stupid amount of money on substandard housing once you have arrived in NZ. However, unless you live in Auckland, Christchurch or Wellington forget ever finding the job you were led to believe existed on your aŕrival in NZ. The rest of NZ is rural, parochial to the extreme, inhabited by xenophobic rednecks. There are no professional jobs in most of NZ & you will quickly find that either you are the wrong skin colour or you are not really wanted there. New Zealanders will happily take your money, like blood sucking leeches. DON’T EMIGRATE TO NEW ZEALAND! Stay in your own country and look at other opportunities or look to another country to emigrate to where you will not be treated like a second class citizen & financially exploited as in New Zealand!
Hi, Rich,
Is this really happing in NZ, as I am planning to study and work in new zealand. I am also planning to settle there. How is the job market for banking and finance sector? Please help so I can change my decision.
Jinal to answer your question, the answer is yes, I would not recommend coming to New Zealand, I have lived in New Zealand for 21+ years and have seen what the employment opportunity or process is like, in New Zealand its about who you know and its about networking with the right people and also some job opportunities that I have applied for where I made it to the interview sometimes its the manger’s relatives son or even daughter or extended family member getting the job rather than the outsider