Kiwis flocking to Oz yet again

The flight of Kiwis to Australia is on the rise again - and this time it's looking like a long-term exodus rather than another short-term migration.

The net outflow of people across the Tasman has doubled in the past two years to 21,439 in the year to January and is heading towards the peak losses of just over 30,000 a year reached in the late 1980s and again five years ago.

National leader Don Brash highlighted the trend in his Orewa speech citing 600 people a week leaving for Australia, although the net effect - taking into account New Zealanders who leave and Australians who come here - is 400 a week, still enough to empty a city the size of Taupo every year.

But this exodus is different from previous migrations, which coincided with economic slumps at home. New Zealand is losing people despite recent boom conditions and the world's lowest unemployment.

The trend is also different because the exodus is led by people who have immigrated here and can't get jobs in their professions, even though employers are short of skilled labour.

Both native-born Kiwis and immigrants are leaving a country where unemployment has fallen to just 3.6 per cent and are competing for jobs in a new land where unemployment is still 5.2 per cent. But they are being lured by incomes which are persistently higher even when the Australian economy, like ours, is slowing.

Electrician Grahame Boyd, made redundant by a former star of New Zealand industry, Ion Automotive, has doubled his wages from $18 to A$33.70 ($38.70) an hour by shifting to a mining construction site in Queensland.

Eileen Ruka earned $10.50 an hour at an Avondale plastics factory but expects to earn A$19 an hour as a bar manager in Melbourne.

On average, after adjusting for prices and the exchange rate, real incomes in Australia are now 32 per cent higher than here. The gap is widening with a 7.4 per cent drop in the kiwi dollar against the Australian dollar so far this year.

Migrant groups said the exodus of immigrants was no surprise given the number of well-qualified migrants working at Auckland's petrol stations and supermarkets because they can't get jobs in their own professions.

"An engineer working at a petrol station will get depressed. His self-esteem is down in the dumps," said Shankar Nair, a retired major-general in the Indian Army who chairs the Migrants Support Services centre in Onehunga.