Say Goodbye to New Zealand (Part 3)

I am loving Australia, I really am and to be honest I cant see us going back to New Zealand in the foreseeable future. Its possible that Sydney may not remain home forever, but I think Australia will be. Don't get me wrong, I love NZ, its a beautiful country and has a lot of really good things going for it, but at the moment we just cant afford to live there. I'm not pointing the finger at any one political party or politician as the blame needs to be laid across all of them.

For the last 20 years, pretty much as long as I have been working full time, all I have heard from NZ politicians is that we need to keep wages low to compete with Asia/keep inflation down and that the "Trickle down" theory will work, we just have to let corporations make even bigger profits. Now like me you can probably see the holes in this argument.

1. Corporations don't pass profits down to workers. They just don't work that way.
2. Even if corporations wanted to raise the workers wages (this will occur when the snouted ones become airborne) the government has a policy of keeping wages low. Corporations cant raise wages as it will lower profits and raise inflation.

To make a long story short, this has led to en extended period of New Zealand workers getting the shaft. If you are getting a wage rise which simple grants you cost of living increases you are doing really well. On top of the wages issue is the problem of massive immigration and a large immigrant student population fuelling a house prices boom. So the NZ worker is making very little money to allow NZ to compete with Asia. Meanwhile the Asians are moving into NZ in huge numbers and bringing all their money with them.

So now NZ workers, whose real wages have risen something like 20% in the last 15 years cannot afford to buy property in their own country as property prices have increased on average by 200%. Meanwhile corporate profits have increased 300% and politicians salaries by 100%. The cost of living in NZ is massive. They have screwed up, they have created a system whereby they cannot raise workers wages, but if they don't raise wages they will lose all their educated, experienced and skilled workers to other countries.

Ignore all the politicians and accountants and what they will tell you; this is my experience as a New Zealand worker.

1. The cost of living in Sydney (one of the most expensive places in Australia) is lower than it is in Auckland. I pay less for food, power, transport, petrol, gas, water, clothing, shoes and going out.
2. I get more money in my pocket at the end of the month in Sydney than in NZ. I pay less tax, and what tax I do pay I can claim back and end up with a cash bonus at the end of the year.
3. I make 30% more NET in Sydney than I was making in NZ.
4. One of the politicians arguments for staying in NZ is that its a beautiful country. I can assure you that Australia is also beautiful. we have done a lot of driving in NSW and I can assure you there are some fantastic places to see.
5. The weather. You don't realise just how much it rains in NZ until you don't live there. I hate rain, I love warmth.

I saw a statistic recently that 40,000 New Zealanders a year are leaving the country. I cant believe that the Politicians don't look at numbers like that and ask themselves where they went wrong.

Having said all of that, there is a place in NZ that is my little piece of Heaven. If I had my choice this is where I would love to be.

Manganui Harbour.
'Manganui' is a Maori word meaning "Big Fish"

The view south from the deck at Coopers beach

2 minutes from Manganui.

The view North from the deck at Coopers beach
2 minutes from Manganui.

Coopers beach is my little piece of Paradise and always will be. In order to ever be able to afford to live there, I will have to spend the next 20 years working in Australia. There is something wrong with that.

Say Goodbye to New Zealand (Part 2)

Well its almost over.
We are only 6 days from flying out. As of 4Pm AEST I will officially be a Sydney resident. To be quite honest getting to Sydney has been the hard part, actually being in Sydney and having to find a place to live/work etc is going to be the easy bit. We have both been working enormously hard to get ready to move. If all we had to do was move our stuff to Sydney we would have been easily done in a week or so. However because we own our own house and we are planning on renting it out we have to finish the 2 major projects we started on the house before Jicki was offered the job in Sydney.

Suddenly instead of having 6 months to finish these projects we have only had 6 weeks. On top of both of those we discovered the fence was rotten down one side and large sections had to be replaced. So over the last few weeks we have:

Lifted 2000 bricks from the walkway at the back of our house. Leveled off the walkway so that it makes 3 steps down, dug-in and edged with railway sleepers, dug out several cubic meters of clay. Laid Scoria and sand to provide a bedding, relaid all the bricks.

Dug out 5 fence posts which were rotten, replaced the posts with new uprights, concreted them all in, replaced 10 meters of fence boards which were rotten. Relaid all the earth and planted new flowers.

Completely stripped the all the paint from the wood in the front entrance way. This is 100 years of multiple layers of mostly lead based paint on 4 door frames, kick plates and front door. If you are ever looking to restore wood in a home I can heartily recommend Coopers Wood Restoration System. Well worth the phone call and our entrance looks absolutely fantastic. Its still hard work to do the stripping but you will come up with a finish that will blow you away and best of all, no sanding.

Cleaned all the walls, repainted, removed the doors and had them dipped, we were going to hand strip them as well but we simply ran out of time. To do a decent job is about 6-8 hours per side and we just didn't have the spare time unfortunately. Its taken me about another 2 hours to do a really bad job fixing all the damage to the doors from the strippers. I have to oil and hang the doors and replace the locks that were removed tonight.

Cleaned, de-moulded and painted the front steps.

Organized to actually have our stuff shipped to Sydney. Gave away LOTS of stuff to friends, family and in some cases passing strangers. Sold my Motorcycle (Sob) and did lots of research on living in NSW, figured out how to pay our mortgage from another country (sort of), organized a rental agent to manage and rent our place, quit my job and after nearly 8 years that was a very hard thing to do, made sure I have some form of contact number or email address for all my friends and family, tidied all the gardens, fixed and sold my PC, went on a 4 day holiday, spent a weekend in Sydney on a research trip, thanks to Kez for driving us around all day!, researched the next bike I will buy in Sydney, unless I can get a full license, if so I will buy this beast, oh and we are both still working full time.

So its been a hell of a couple of weeks I can tell you.

What I am looking forward to is being in the same time zone as the rest of Southern Armada. Being able to log on and join up into groups, being able to go along to SA drinks in Sydney. I'm looking forward to a new Job, new things to learn. I really wanted to try and stay within APN as I have very much enjoyed my time here but APN don't have any technical services in Sydney, they are all based north of Brisbane. I interviewed for a job yesterday that I really really want. Its interesting and would give me a very good foothold into a section of the IT industry that I have long held an interest in.

Ah well, the night we get to Sydney we are going to go out to Dinner and get very drunk!.

So farewell to New Zealand for the next couple of years and Hello to Sydney!

Say Good Bye to New Zealand

Well, I've been back for a really long time, in fact I've been living back in New Zealand since I returned from my OE in 1996, but its time to move again. Just before Xmas 2006 my Girlfriend was, completely out of the blue, offered a promotion working in Sydney. After she came down off the ceiling we talked about it and decided it really wasn't an opportunity we could pass up. I mean how many people get offered promotions with international transfers? not very many. This was something that she had been working towards for a very long time. It's a bit convoluted but essentially, she had been working in a different division of the same company for 7 years. That division had on and off promised her the same sort of promotion, but it had been blocked by (male) persons higher up every time it was suggested. She transferred divisions about 2 years ago and this time her boss (female) suggested it, approved it and we are moving.

This sort of opportunity can't be ignored for 2 reasons in my mind. Firstly, if offered once and turned down they won't offer it again. Also, once its offered and accepted they will look at you for other roles where you need to move countries. They know that you are flexible enough to have done it once and can do it again. Secondly its very rare to be offered a transfer internationally. Effectively the company is paying us to emigrate, this is just an awesome offer.

So, the GF will hit the ground running in Sydney with an income already sorted. I need to find work (negotiations underway with an ex-boss now) and sort out some sort of income. I am told by a lot of people that I won't have a lot of issues with finding work in Sydney. However, it's always nice when other people tell you that, they aren't the ones who have to go out there and do it.

We won't be selling the house, we would never ever get back into the NZ housing market if we did that, so we need to find someone to rent our place. We had actually started 2 major house projects thinking we would have plenty of time to finish them. Now of course it turns out we have about 6 weeks to finish them and get the place rented. We are hoping to make at least 400NZ$/week for the place, the rental agents coming round next week will be able to confirm or deny that. Either way we will still need to be topping up the mortgage in NZ. I doubt very much if we can make enough rental to actually cover the mortgage payments.

I'm a bit worried about the old girl actually. I've come to really love my 100 year old cottage. She takes an enormous amount of looking after but she is a great little place. Our experience with renters in the past haunt been good with the last renter being a crack whore.

We have been looking in Sydney on the North Shore. We really like a suburb called Lane Cove and we will try to move in around that area. Of course, we have no idea what the market will actually be like in 3 months when we move but we need to get a good idea of the prices and styles of tenancies.

It will be really weird; I've been an NZ gamer trying to fit in with Aussie time zones for so long it will be odd to actually be in the Aussie time zones. No more staying awake till 2 am just to be able to play with my Guildies. I'm also going to be buying a new bike. I will probably go for the GV650 as I can buy it on a NSW limited bike license. I was planning on buying one in NZ anyway but I need a full license over here. The Aussies have a much better graduated system with options to move to bigger bikes depending on how long you have been riding and the power to weight ratio of the bike in question.

Intro

I've done this the better part of all my life, writing that is. When I was a kid I would carry a note book around and a smooth writing ink pen with me everywhere. I was famous for it at school. Bullies would avoid me in case I "wrote about them". I'm not sure why that would have been a threat worthy of granting immunity from bullies but it was.

So anyway, the basics. Male, 35, of European descent, born in South Africa, traveled to New Zealand when I was 5 and grew up there. I spent most of my working life in the hospitality industry running bars and restaurants, usually for a pittance and with the added bonus of getting no respect for being extremely good at my job.

So I decided to go back to school and study for a computer qualification. I graduated in 2000 and I've been working at the New Zealand Herald as a systems administrator ever since.

I've been a Geek all my life but its only recently that I have 'come out' so to speak and found the confidence to express my love for all things Geek. So this is my first post, one of many. I know I will move on and move up and I have in the past lost a lot of things like diaries and PDA's. This gives me a third party method of keeping all my random bullshit in one place.

Goddamn it

Sixteenth of December.
I am internet less till then. Apparently thats the absolute fastest Telecom can install my DSL.

They Suck.

My offsider has been playing with a new backend for our website at www.domain-admins.com and when he is done I will be redesigning the front end and we will be relaunching the site. The new site has got all sorts of good things in it. Its database driven, works with PHP, has a built in blog ability, is all css configured etc.

So I think once its up, this blog will move back to Domain-Admins and I will convert the old blog to the new site.

Everquest Southern Armada Raids Week Fourty Nine and Fifty

26/01/04 - 08/02/04 Week Fourty Nine and Week Fifty


Well I packed up my stuff and threw it all in a friends car so they could take it up North with them as it wouldn't fit in our car. Why did it not fit you ask?. 


Well young Kezlar and his family had accepted our invite to come across to fabulous NZ for a holiday. Then we raced over to pickup Kezlar, Mrs Kezlar and Junior Kezlar and headed up North ourselves.


We headed up to a place called Coopers Beach in the Far North of New Zealand where my GF's parents have a fantastic beach house. Coopers Beach is on the edge of Doubtless Bay and there is no doubt in my mind that it is truly one of the most beautiful places on Earth.


The weather in Coopers at this time of year is always fantastic. Well, its usually fantastic. I have been going to Coopers at the same time every year for about 6-7 years and this was easily the worst weather we have ever had.


This year we had a number of really nasty weather fronts peel off the east coast of Australia and bring New Zealand REALLY heavy rain and REALLY shit weather. We got 3 really beautiful days at the beginning and 2-3 days at the end and the rest of it was raining and overcast. At one point the rain was actually coming in horizontally under the eves of the house.
Ah well, shit happens. Sorry about that Kez. At least we had a couple of good days.


After this brief interruption we will be back to our regularly scheduled Raid Updates as of this week.