[vorg]

And those 180,000 places is only the front door into Australia. The back door is to immigrate to New Zealand, become a NZ citizen, then move to Australia. Because Australia and New Zealand have a single labor market, citizens of both can live and work in each others countries without any special permission or numerical restrictions. From my personal observations, virtually all immigrants to NZ move to Australia once they can, and frequently refer to New Zealand as Australia's back door.

[dwd]

While true it's potentially harder to immigrate to New Zealand unless you come from Kiribati, Tuvalu or Tonga which have an extra entry option.

[vorg]

Not sure what you mean by "potentially harder". I've met many people who immigrated to NZ because they couldn't get into Australia. They then moved to Australia within a month or two of qualifying for and getting NZ citizenship. It used to take 3 yrs of NZ residency (tho with very lenient allowances for time out of the country every calendar year) to become a citizen but was changed to 5 yrs around 10 yrs ago, so maybe the situation's changed a little since then.

[lancewiggs]

Much easier as NZ has a simple points system.

But I don't understand why you'd want to leave, having lived in the US, UK, Australia, South Africa and NZ, the choice of NZ for ease of doing business and life is easy.

[dwd]

Happy to stand corrected. Curious as to how they were disqualified. Was it current demand for their trade/qualification or something else?

[vorg]

In the 1990's it was easier to immigrate to NZ than Australia under the different points systems of the two countries. Virtually immigrant I spoke to in NZ got in because of qualification and work experience in China.