Questions to Kiwis

New Zealand is extremely safe outside of the main cities, especially in the south island.  New Zealand raises a lot of its own table food, but naturally a lot of things are imported as well.  Guns are illegal to own in New Zealand, and the police do not even carry weapons.  The Government is not Orwellian at all, and I would say there would be a zero percent chance of the army turning against the population.  If the Maori could have lived there for hundreds of years with a lot less than the country has now, then New Zealand could be perfectly self sustaining if you don't mind mutton. 

I love mutton. And wool. :)

Guns are legal to own if you get a gun licence.

Crime rates are not realy any better than many western countries.

We export something like 90% of the food we produce

People of pacific heritage make up a significant portion of the population and have mostly maintained strong family. People of european heritage are more itinerant and mostly have weaker family link. Rural communities are quite strong and help each other. People are very self reliant. Many have food gardens. Through marriage the population is gradually becoming more pacific in heritage.

 

It is quite safe. I live in a South Island provincial town with about 35,000. We can walk around the town centre at night without problems. We leave our doors unlocked when we go out but keep the vehicle locked when out. Have been here more than 20 years never been victim of any 'crime'.

 

Industrial mono cropping has had the same effect here as elsewhere. It would take quite a while for us to be able to feed ourselves without oil. Our sea and foreshore although depleted are still productive in some remote places

Without transport life would be much harder

Government is generally innocuous. No ID cards, no numbers. No chance of armed forces against pop 

 

Most guns are owned by people licensed by police and used for recreational hunting or pest control. Very few people have guns, at a guess maybe one in 100 households or less.

Don

___________________

Store fed, store owned

Hi Nime,

All of NZ has a good climate, though there is a range cool temperate, alpine to sub tropical. You shouldn't go hungry here, even on a small area of land.

I live in the Bay of Islands, Far North of NZ. We have a warm climate and can grow a huge range of food, Good rainfall and soil, I have pineapple, avocado and banana ripening well but also the usual northern european crops as well. Our electricity comes from our local geothermal plant - consumer owned with dividends paid to consumers annually. About 75% of NZ electricity is generated from renewables, we also have good gas reserves and significant oil. Most of our international trade is from agriculture, tourism, forest products (plantation) fisheries and some high tech. In common with a lot of western type economies, consumer type manufacturing has shifted to low labour cost countries (China).

Family and traditional values are strongest away from the main centres, in the cities I would say similar to the US. The Maori people (I am part Maori) have strong family ties unfortunately strained thanks to adjustments to European values.

We only import some luxury foods as answered above

We are a small country so most complex  manufactured products (motor vehicles etc) are imported for reasons of scale. We could cover most our existing transport needs with domestic oil, nat. gas, and electricity(renewable. We could function to a reasonable level with no external inputs.

No ID cards or Internet restrictions

I don't know about the chances of the military turning against the population, fairly low key sort of outfit, I can't even imagine the circumstances that would initiate such a response so can't really answer that one.

You can obtain a gun licence relatively easily, clean police record and no mental illness required. Low level of gun ownership.

There is a thread already started on this site for folk wanting to find out more about immigrating to NZ, you will find some excellent comments and links here.  

http://www.chrismartenson.com/forum/kiwi-overseas-looking-new-zealand-contacts/13004

Cheers,

David 

 

First of all, thank you for your responses. You have been most helpful and good ambasadors for your country.

Re. family - I ask, because family has been ruined through most of the West by many factors, including rejection of God and widespread replacement of religious belief with mindless consumption. I follow also this blog and a few times I have read most worrying things about the situation in NZ in that respect, including anti-family indoctrination in schools, pro-abortion legislation and other stuff that has made places like the UK what they are today. 

Re. the Internet - I heard Internet censorship is coming fast to Australia, something quite close to what China has already implemented with "wrong" views and texts filtered out. I heard too there is an effort in the NZ to force ISPs to disconnect Internauts "breaking copyright" and denounced by the recording industry. How does the situation on the ground look like to you living there? Were you aware of those actions?

 

I copied these notes from an article  on ecomigration in Washington Post (? I think) that said

In the recent Global Peace Index, New Zealand finished among the most peaceful countries at No. 4. The U.S. is ranked 97. -- According to the Seventh United Nations Survey of Crime Trends, New Zealand has a murder rate among the lowest in the world, ranking the 10th lowest out of 62 countries. The U.S. ranks 24th. -- New Zealand has low rates for MRSA, infectious disease, HIV, AIDS and Hepatitis B and C, and its blood supply is considered among the safest in the world. 

New Zealand would offer a comparable quality of life, has an excellent environmental record and is isolated from global conflicts by large tracts of the Pacific Ocean. Its tropical, subtropical, temperate and arctic zones also offer a variety of "bioenvironments" as a hedge against the vagaries of climate change.

New Zealand's environmental credentials are no secret: Nearly half of all skilled migrants to the country cite its "climate or the clean, green environment to be a main reason" for moving there, according to a survey conducted by the nation's Department of Labor.

Although the nation of 4.3 million produces only one-fifth of 1 percent of the world's greenhouse gases, it is ramping up production of energy from renewable sources, said Roy Ferguson, New Zealand's ambassador to the United States.

LARINA/David I think your idea of KIWI Connection forum is needed as there are hits and misses on the subject that people keep coming back too.

I was at a KEA London event and tried to make some links there too.

LARINA/David I think your idea of KIWI Connection forum is needed as there are hits and misses on the subject that people keep coming back too.

I was at a KEA London event and tried to make some links there too.

http://www.keanewzealand.com

Questions I still have are:

where to build a community ... I have extended family ties in South Is. but not sure I would like the cold.  Karamea is a place I plan to check out this year though

I grew up in Auckland but do not wish to be there.  Studied in Hamilton but do not like being so inland.

Challenges ...

A web site I'd recommend is Move2Nz. Interesting advice for would-be migrants.

BTW - in their last newsletter they sent this alarming update:

 

Rising crime in schools

In 2008 Police were called 1,658 times to attend schools throughout New Zealand to deal with violence, drugs or sex offences.

These figures were released under the Official Information Act and show officers were called out an average of 1,531 times each year from 1998. Over the past decade violent offences jumped 27 per cent from 869 to 1,064.

School enrolments rose only 4 per cent between 2001 and 2009 – so statistically these results are alarming.

 

Crime in NZ cont.

New Zealand has an image of being a safe, clean country at the end of the world. Considering moving from where we are now we started to look at hard data about different countries, and we were quite surprised to see the statistics:

• NZ persecutes 31.059 persons per 1,000 people, which is 3rd in the world, and more than places like Turkey or Belarus (source),
• There are 7.47881 assaults per 1,000 people in the NZ, which is far less than South Africa (people from SA flee in thousands, many of them to NZ) but is a level not different than US at 7.56923 or UK at 7.45959, also much more than most of Europe (appropriate number for Poland is 0.850459, in Germany 1.4183) (source),
• Burglaries - also NZ in the top ten at 16.2763 per 1,000 people - again, more than UK, more than US, (source),
• Car theft - NZ at #4 at 5.45031 per 1,000 people, way more than most of EU (eg. Germany 1.00767) and quite amazing given that this is a remote island inhabited by 4 mln people - so what happens with all those stolen vehicles? It would seem an easy thing to crack given the small size of the population and the fact that stolen cars are not shipped out of the country so they must be "consumed" locally. (source),
• Rapes -NZ didn't make top ten at 0.213383 per 1,000 people, but is still worse than UK (@ 0.142172) or most of continental EU (Germany 0.0909731) (source),
• all that leads to NZ being second in the world with most crimes per capita after Dominica! (source)

Categories where NZ fares better are murders and manslaughter, so it seems NZ is full of assaults, theft and rape but not murder. Also, when it comes to robberies it is not that bad - on par with Ukraine and France (source). No wonder NZ is at the bottom of the list of countries when it comes to perceived safety (source).

So how come NZ has this positive image? Is it all just successful PR and people falling in love with the scenic beauty of the place not noticing this? Or maybe all crime is concentrated in select areas and there is little or none elsewhere? And - what is being done, if anything, to effectively crack down on crime?

Or maybe the stats are wrong? The image painted by hard data is very different than the general perception. This may be in part due to crime being seriously underreported in defunct or weak countries - that's why in my comparisons I referred mostly to Western countries liker Germany where reporting is most reliable. Also, as you may note all the links above lead to one site. This is because it gathers all the data in one place so is easy to use while writing something - like this post. However, when I first encountered this data I didn't believe it and checked some of the data - like assaults etc. - elsewhere. Unfortunatelly, the numbers are same or very simillar.

So, dear Kiwis: what gives?