I was looking at the immigration statistics for Australia and New Zealand. It showed that the UK is the biggest provider of immigrants to both Aus and NZ. There are over 1 million people born in the UK currently living in Australia and over 200,000 UK-born people living in New Zealand.

Given that the UK is a prosperous and developed country, why do so many of its citizens choose to leave for countries on the other side of the world?

27 comments

  3. Let’s see, nice weather guaranteed, better quality of life, no negatives from an education perspective if you move with kids, just as prosperous relatively speaking. I guarantee if it wasn’t a 24 hour flight away those statistics would sky rocket.

  4. They’re both former British colonies, so a large amount of their current population have British or Irish heritage. So we share the same language and very, very similar cultures (right down from cuisine to sport).

    There are also some very high paying jobs over there at the moment (mine work, oil and gas etc), and there is shortage of workers in other fields, , so this along with the weather and life style can be an attractive choice for a British person looking to emigrate.

  6. A lot of nurses and doctors are moving there so that they can actually live a comfortable life, they don’t want to be paid a terrible wage like they are here any longer, understandably.

    I personally would not like to love there though, Australia has massive spiders and I don’t like boiling weather.

  7. The weather’s good, they’re part of the Anglosphere, and the kinds of jobs you can get a visa for tend to pay pretty well.

  8. Because people are fed up with the uk, I’d happily move to New Zealand if I had the money

  9. Some people just want a change. Australia and New Zealand are commonwealth English speaking countries and they happen to have better weather so they are more desirable than most (if not all) other countries.

    I know I was looking up how to get an Australian visa a month or so ago when I was desperate for sun and beaches lol.

  10. People too lazy to learn a language so that limits it to English speaking countries

    Grass is always greener, they dislike their life in the uk and seem to think new Zealand and Australia are better in every way

    The biggest sign of the latter are people who move to Australia due to house prices…

  13. Australia pays considerably more for most industries. New Zealand pays higher for healthcare.

    Life there seems generally better.

  15. Its a sunny version of Britain that speaks English.

    In my experience, of living in both, the people who are most ardent lovers of Australia are people who have never been and assume its some mix of the beach and neighbours.

    I had an Australian gf who lived in the UK with me for a while and one of the main reasons she wanted us to leave was she was so sick of people asking her why she came and left “beautiful” australia… when we were in a little picturesque yorkshire village and she had come from Adelaide, and always from people who had never been.

    Britain has a weird chip on its shoulder at times.

  17. The common perception was that NZ was the UK but stuck in the 50s. When I went I found that to be very wrong, it’s a modern country with modern problems, culture and attitudes. The only bit stuck in the 50s was that people were just nicer to each other, more trusting.

    Otherwise, the scenery was great, ranging from tropical to glaciers, the food was good, lots of activities and nothing was trying to eat you or sting you like in Aus. It would certainly be worth trying out if you were looking for somewhere to settle.

  18. Having been to both countries many times, both are miles better than uk in the majority of aspects

  19. You know the grass here, right? The grass here is shit compared to the grass there. Their grass is *properly* green. You only think you’ve seen green grass here.

  20. It’s been an ongoing project for a couple of hundred years and is very much part of our culture.

    As a result of this many British families have relatives living in Australia or New Zealand, and we’ve all been exposed to enough Australian media for the prospect of moving there to feel adventurous but not scary.

    There is a little bit of an under current of some people moving there because they think ‘this country is going to the dogs’, which until recently was a euphemism for ‘this country has too many immigrants’. These days everyone thinks it’s crap here, so it’s harder to spot the racists.

  23. In the 1960s Australia had a massive program to attract Brits. It was seen as very attractive and so a lot of families emigrated. Most of my wife’s family moved over at that time. I nearly emigrated myself around 8 years ago. I am a senior IT consultant and was made a very good offer. The problem is, that at that time, Australia hadn’t been effected by the Financial crisis due to China buying up all of their raw materials. The down side of this was that prices continued to go up and at one point Sydney and Melbourne were the two most expensive cities to live in the world. I found that for the first 2 years I would be clobbered with essentially a non Aussie tax, but after 2 years I could get citizenship and it would calm down. To be honest I found it just too expensive. My wife was gutted because she had dreamed of moving over there, but the reality was we were priced out. To be honest I am not sure I would move over there now due to all the climate craziness.

  24. I think a lot of those British born immigrants are from 70 years ago. The UK had a flux of immigrants arriving in Australia during the mid 1900s, post ww2.

    I’d be interested to see statistics from the past 10-15 years to see if they correlate.

  26. A number of my friends have gone to OZ and never come back – I’m told the quality of life over there destroys life in the UK in just about every aspect – the only reason to come back is missing friends and family.

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