Comments by Geoffrey Churchman

An e-mail received yesterday from Chris Luxon said in part:

I’ve been on the campaign trail for three weeks and one thing is clear – Kiwis feel we’re heading in the wrong direction. I’ve lost count of the number of people who say to me – “if you don’t win, I’m leaving.”  

The polls are reassuring that Chippy and Labour are going to be turfed out of office and while some of their 2020 voters are deserting his party for the lunatic extremists — Green and TPM — it wont be enough to give the Leftists any more than about 45% of the seats.

During the worst period of Comrade Jacinda’s tyranny, from about August 2021 to the beginning of this year, I often discussed with people, if they decided to leave NZ, where would they go?

The basic consideration is that you don’t get your cake and eat it — there will always be upsides and downsides to living somewhere else. It’s a standard thing for 20-something Kiwis to seek the big OE (overseas experience) and that’s good. They need to experience how the rest of the world live, or some of it anyway. Most head to Sydney, Melbourne or Brisbane, some to London and a few to Dublin.

At 23 in 1980 I went instead to Los Angeles which was something of a culture shock, with smog, car-centricity and high crime rates (homicides were 34 times those of NZ) but it was a good place to make money and in those days rents were low. Some things have changed — the air is a lot cleaner and crime rates are lower, but it’s not cheap anymore and there are tent villages of homeless, not helped by all the illegal migrants Biden and the Democrats have let flood in.

Unless you can get a job paying over $US 120,000 ($NZ 200,000) it’s not a city I’d recommend now. In New York it’s even more.

The other option is Europe. The only problem is that even where nearly everybody speaks English like Holland, Germany and Scandinavia, it’s hard to get a good job without a basic knowledge of the local language. Despite that, the country that appeals to me the most is Czechia — a picturesque country that has developed surprising quickly economically after throwing out Communism in 1989 and is fairly First World standard, but still with Second World prices, so money goes further. However, there is still the language barrier; a knowledge of German or Polish will help sometimes. As I say, don’t count on getting your cake and eating it.

Some readers may have their own recommendations.