It's so much easier to make ends meet

Christel and Kevin Broederlow brought their sons back to Auckland but couldn't afford to live here on one income, so returned to Australia

When Christel Broederlow joined the crowds at Logan City's Waitangi Day celebration south of Brisbane last month, she found it hard to believe that she was in Australia.

She estimates that 10,000 people attended, 85 per cent of them Maori.

About the same number attended another Waitangi Day event a few kilometres away, and 7000 turned out for one at Redcliffe, further north.

The Logan City event has been going for only three years.

"When we first arrived here nine years ago it was like 'spot the Maori' at the shopping mall," Mrs Broederlow says.

"Now it's like one in every 100 people. You can tell when you go shopping, when you go to the beach, you can see it everywhere you go."

In the past 40 years, the New Zealand-born population of Australia has grown from 50,000 to 442,189 (as at 2004) - 12.8 per cent of all Kiwi-born people in the world.

Maori in Australia have leapt from 4000 to well over 100,000 - around 13 per cent of all Maori alive today.

In the 200-odd years since Europeans began settling on these islands, transtasman migration has waxed and waned with the economic fortunes on each side of the Ditch. There have been long periods of net inflows to New Zealand when this country was wealthier, bringing in future leaders such as Prime Ministers Ward and Savage.

But the last sustained inflow ended in 1967, when a collapse of New Zealand wool prices allowed mineral-rich Australia to pull decisively ahead of us in average incomes.

A net outflow began which reached 10,000 people in 1969, was staunched as our economy picked up in the early 1970s, but then haemorrhaged to around 30,000 a year at the end of each of the last three decades.

In between, the flood halted briefly when the Australian economy soured in the early 80s and 90s, and after the New York terrorist attacks in 2001 and Bali in 2002 drove Kiwis of home.

But after each of these respites, the bleeding resumed. In the year to January there was a net loss of 21,439 people across the Tasman - 412 a week.

Despite common impressions, this is still only 0.6 per cent of the population. But over 40 years the continued drain has taken out a very significant part of our working-age population. Just over one in six of all NZ-born people in Australasia in all age groups from 20 to 60 now live in Australia.

Retiring to the Gold Coast is still fairly rare - only 9 per cent of NZ-borns in the 65-plus age bracket live in Australia. As do only 6.5 per cent of the under-20s, indicating that most migrants do not take children with them.

In contrast to New Zealand, where emigration has left a surplus of women in the marriageable age groups, the NZ-born population in Australia has 2.6 per cent more males than females.

Partly because they are mostly in the working-age groups, the NZ-born are more likely than other Australians to be in paid work, and were more likely to earn more than A$800 ($921) a week in 2001 (23.6 per cent of NZ-born, 19.1 per cent of Australian-born).

They are more likely to have university qualifications (11 per cent vs 9.3 per cent) and trade certificates (12.6 per cent vs 9.4 per cent).

They come from across the workforce, slightly weighted towards the low-paid end where Kiwi wages are hardest to live on. Last year a net 0.7 per cent of tradespeople, plant and machine operators and assemblers crossed the Tasman, compared with 0.5 per cent of professionals.

Mrs Broederlow, whose husband Kevin was a builder and is now a draftsman, says he worked 70 to 100 hours a week in New Zealand, and she worked 30 hours, to make ends meet.

"We were sick of working round the clock with bills up to our head and never really feeling we were getting ahead," she says.

In Australia, Mr Broederlow works Monday to Friday, and Mrs Broederlow can stay home with their four sons. They receive A$400 a week in family payments from the Government.

"We own our own house now," she says. "Here there's a A$7000 grant to first-home buyers."

After five years in Australia, the family moved back to Auckland in 2001 and Mrs Broederlow enrolled in fulltime study. But they couldn't afford to live on one income.

"We came back," she says. "We know so many Maoris and Kiwis and Polynesians that have lived here for a few years, gone home - and come back within the next 12 months."