Went to Hawaii for couple weeks one year ago. Experienced culture shock.
NZ is probably best place in the world.
Better incomes, quality of living (houses are vastly better quality), infrastructure, entertainment, and weather.
The downsides is extreme weather, too big cities and much less nice people (historical backgrounds between kiwis and aussies are polar opposites).
Unless you, say, like to travel, or want to live in a place with people from a wide variety of backgrounds.
Also, NZ is pretty diverse. I work in Wellington and my team of 20 is from nine different countries and ethnicities, there's only four born Kiwi's in it (and the Kiwi's have different ethnicities as well some are Maori, others are Pakeha, and others are Indian Kiwis). I read about immigration statistics the other day and 8 of the top ten ethnicities which are granted permanent residents status are from Asia, the Pacific, and Africa, only two are from countries with a European majority (the UK and the US). I find Wellington to be more diverse than when I worked in San Francisco or London.
Culture wise, I keep saying NZ is like 50s in US - tons of new expats, everyone with decent background, keen to work hard. Most of Europe and US has now second generation foreigners which is not that interesting. Simple number: software teams I worked on only had 10-30% of kiwi's.
Our largest city is also our most diverse.
> Auckland is one of the world's most culturally diverse cities with the fourth most foreign-born population, an international study has found. > With 39 per cent of its population born overseas, the city is revealed to be more diverse than Sydney, Los Angeles, London and even New York.
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&object...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diversity_index
For some reason, the article you linked made up their own (very poor) measure of diversity. Imagine a city that's half white locals, and half white British immigrants (temporary or permanent). Would you consider such a city as diverse? The measure in that news article would put this city as being 50% diverse, even higher than Wellington's 39%.
There's also not the extreme rifts that we see elsewhere. If you look at reform for instance then there was broad cross party support for firearm reform, abortion reform, and euthanasia reform all in the last few months with both left and right parties voting for all of the above, something which would be pretty inconceivable in a country like the US where people seem to take opposite views on things just because they refuse to agree with the other side.
The population is largely free of extremists and have a culture of just getting on with things and working together, this comes from the extreme isolation which we've historically had. That leads to people being irreligious, educated, and practical.
It's very democratic and has very low levels of corruption, politicians are accessible and mostly trusted.
This is tempered by a high cost of living compared to wages.
Unfortunately we have seen a rise of US style far-right opinions and extreme views fed from the internet (like antivax and also a rise of disinformation and fake news). Ironically this may mean that politicians will be forced to become less accessible and democracy and freedoms may take a back seat to security as we've seen in the US. I hope not.
This is so true. People are just so multi-faceted here. I have a friend who's a developer, mechanic, investor, guitar player and a stripper.
And then there was other side of anit-vax, anti-gmo, anti-progress people... We've got some of that in NZ, but nowhere close so visible.
Unless you're a woman of reproductive age.
There's a new law which just passed the first reading in parliament (with 80% voting yes) to remove any restrictions so thankfully this will no longer be an issue and a woman will be able to make the decision without having to go to a doctor.
So, while the laws are old it's actually positive that there's so much cross party support for progressive reform. Another law which is in it's second reading is euthanasia reform which has similar support.
Staying in the UK for me is like staying in an abusive relationship or a job you hate. It made me deeply unhappy, so instead of complaining and bringing my friends down I found a life to love overseas.
Nope, the US is firmly in the Wants a Prize for Basic Decency[0] category. Which is better than most other places, but that says more about other places than the US.
0: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WantsAPrizeForBa...