Today is the last day of my working holiday to the Gold Coast of Australia. Having thoroughly enjoyed the last week I am looking forward to returning to Auckland New Zealand to see my family and friends quickly before returning to start a new contract here in Australia that will see me travelling more and more I expect.
With the lovely temperatures here during the winter ranging from 20 to 28 degrees during the day, a wonderful light sea breeze with little more than a puff of cloud in the sky you would wonder why everyone doesn’t live here. Having lived on the Gold Coast for the summer of 2001, arriving on September 13 two days after the horrible atrocity of a few days earlier, I can attest to the heat of Queensland in summer. I once made the mistake of leaving the house without my shoes on. You can do that in NZ. In Queensland’s summer, despite the fact it was before 10am, the few hours of sun on the paved brick roads here was enough to cook my tender Kiwi feet. Nevertheless I’m looking forward to returning to the most beautiful country on Earth, NZ.
Although I am clearly biased because of my heritage I would suggest that the New Zealand landscape is one of the most spectacular in the world. With its vast rainfall it is one of the greenest countries and for those of you that have been lucky enough to go to or live in Ireland the North Island is fairly similar; except that in NZ you won’t ever see a stone fence. The South Island though is spectacular for skiiing as any skier or snowboarder will attest. As an Aucklander I should be careful though, there’s a tense rivalry between Auckland being the largest and commercial centre of NZ and the rest of the country. They just love beating us in the rugby and rub our higher salaries in our face.
Of course those well informed will remind me that the highest average wage actually occurs in Wellington, however I would suggest that the use of statistics can be misleading to the uneducated. The highest salaries actually occur in Auckland, it is supported by the leverage of the lower salaried worker no doubt. I was once told by a successful businessman with links to ‘old money’ that the key to business was employing people smarter than you to leverage their work. It is an unfortunate consequence of these seeming truisms that we may be led to forget the fundamentally binary nature of such generalisations. They cannot be true in every circumstance and most especially when more and more demand from employers create a demand pull inflation of the wage required to employ someone. Good old market economy. Can’t wait to get back to NZ.
