"I've been a bit sad recently about my mates all going to Aus and the UK," wrote one young New Zealander in a post on the NZ Reddit community that rapidly gathered hundreds of responses from people who recognised the feeling. "I get a lot of enjoyment from socialising so it's been tough."
It is a small, honest moment. And it is an extremely good description of what New Zealand's net migration data, its wage statistics, its housing affordability numbers, and its Reserve Bank projections are all saying in more formal language: young New Zealanders are leaving, in significant numbers, and the people they leave behind are noticing.
The macroeconomic picture is not subtle. In the year to October 2025, New Zealand recorded net migration losses of working-age people to Australia at rates not seen since the post-GFC period. Australia's labour market has been stronger. Australian wages — particularly in construction, healthcare, and trades — are meaningfully higher. The Australian dollar, while variable, gives people who move across the Tasman more purchasing power for housing costs that are only slightly less extreme than Auckland's.
For people in their mid-20s — the cohort that Reddit post speaks to most directly — the calculation is particularly acute. This is the period when career trajectories diverge, when social capital matters most, and when the decision to stay or go becomes irreversible in the sense that life builds infrastructure around itself: relationships, property, professional networks. When your entire social circle decides to leave in the same twelve-month period, the activation energy required to stay in New Zealand increases substantially.
The individual Reddit responses to the original post described the pattern with remarkable consistency: a friend to Sydney, another to London, another to Melbourne, then Brisbane, then Edinburgh. The shared flat empties. The group chat goes quiet. The invitations stop coming because there is nobody left to send them to.
This is not new. Australia and New Zealand have had a trans-Tasman labour mobility agreement — the Trans-Tasman Travel Arrangement — since 1973. New Zealanders have always moved to Australia. The current wave is sharper, and the data on what is driving it points consistently to three policy failures: the persistent housing crisis, sustained wage stagnation in the industries that employ young workers, and a growing perception that New Zealand lacks the economic dynamism to reward staying.
The Luxon government's economic programme — fiscal consolidation, public service cuts, infrastructure investment deferral — has not addressed the wage gap or the housing affordability problem in any meaningful way in its first two years. Critics would say it has made the underlying conditions worse by reducing the public sector employment that many young, educated New Zealanders rely on.
Wellington has no credible public plan to reverse the trend. There are occasional statements about growing the economy, attracting foreign investment, and improving productivity. There are no policies that specifically target the lived experience driving the emigration decision: the inability to buy a home within a reasonable commute of the city where your job is, the gap between your wages and your Australian equivalent, the sense that the social and professional infrastructure for building a life is more accessible on the other side of the Tasman.
There is also a regional dimension worth naming. New Zealand's Pacific neighbours — Samoa, Tonga, Fiji, and others — have their own deep relationships with trans-national migration. Pacific peoples in New Zealand experience the same emigration pressures as Pakeha and Maori New Zealanders, and they often have less economic cushioning when the conditions deteriorate. The brain drain story is not a story about a single demographic. It is a story about a country leaking human capital at a rate its productive capacity cannot sustain.
Mate, the Reddit post that prompted this story got answered by hundreds of young New Zealanders saying: yes. Same. All my friends left too. When the empirical data and the emotional resonance align that cleanly, that is usually a story worth telling.
