With Australian police services now actively recruiting New Zealand-trained police, another qualified employment group is heading across the ditch for better pay and better working conditions.
Queensland and Northern Territory police services in particular are running international recruiting campaigns aimed at attracting, among others, experienced New Zealand officers.
Our society needs well-trained police just as it needs all those other employment groups being attracted away from the country by the chances of a better life elsewhere.
If you are a young family person with bills and rent or a mortgage to pay and you are not coping financially, of course you will look at other options - you owe it to your loved ones.
If you are a single person wanting to see more of the world, you will perhaps be attracted by the prospect of a better life offshore, especially if you are being actively recruited.
Even many years ago, some of our police upped stakes and went to Australia to be cops; though not in any great numbers, and officers were certainly not following the recruitment campaigns now on offer.
Of the 200 police officers who resigned in 2023, 50 are already part of the Australian police force. Another 70 are understood to be waiting to leave New Zealand.
A first-year constable on the street in New Zealand gets a salary of $74,500, or $83,266 with benefits added. A first-year constable in the Northern Territory can get A$102,000, benefits inclusive.
I struggled to pay the bills as a young family man. My answer was to just get another job. We called it “secondary”.
Other names used by other police services are “moonlighting” and “side hustle”.
When I started my secondary bits and bobs, $2 an hour was considered really good money. It was when most workers were getting about $1.50 per hour. We got more because the employer usually really needed labour urgently.
It was an offence under police regulations to work secondary employment without permission.
If we were caught working secondary we could, theoretically, be dismissed, but usually it resulted in a smack on the hand.
I used to mostly drive a general cartage truck. Hard work. In those days the trucks were usually loaded for you, but unless it was a load emptied by the hoist, it had to be unloaded by hand - a big job when the main stuff I carried was building materials.
You might have got an apprentice or hammer-hand to help you when you arrive on-site, but often you were just left to it.
It was not uncommon to spend six to eight hours day on the truck and then report for duty for another eight hours of beat work. The money was good and it kept one physically very fit.
I spent some time in the Wairarapa in the early 1970s so did farm work.
I painted and wallpapered houses, worked as a builder’s labourer, built tennis courts, emptied railway wagons. Mowed lawns. I got the contract with police to mow all the lawns of empty police houses in the Wellington district, dozens of them. Legal secondary.
My last secondary job was working here in Whanganui as a relief milkman.
My memories of those days are of being weary often.
Would I go to Australia now if I was a cop? No. I’d get a secondary job. However, I am not a young family person struggling to make ends meet in New Zealand or a single person looking for adventure.
