Sandra Paterson: This land is my land - I’ll stay

When I was little, my parents' idea of camping was to get as far away from civilisation as possible. All cooking was done on a fire, even in the rain; and my brother and I spent our days swimming and exploring and building bivouacs out of ferns and branches for the dog to sleep in.

I stopped camping as a teenager and did not sleep under canvas for some 20 years, but when I had my daughter I knew I wanted it to be a part of her childhood, too.

So for the past few summers we have headed off to a spot on the East Cape. Every year we visit the same waterfall and the same cave; and every year the tent gets ripped or collapses in a howling gale.

We make damper and toast marshmallows; and just about every day I think something along the lines of "how I love this country".

But it is not just on holiday that I feel that way. I love this isolated wee corner of the world for hundreds of reasons, some big, some small.

One of those OECD reports shows that almost a quarter of New Zealanders with tertiary education now live overseas but although I, too, could earn better money in another country, with arguably better healthcare, public transport and education, I have no plans to leave.

This is where my roots are and where I belong, which is impossible to measure against a pay-cheque or a fancy ensuite. If you move to another country or make an OE permanent, your children will grow up as the children of another land.

I want my daughter to have salt water in her hair and fish 'n' chips in her tummy and the independent, No8 wire spirit for which New Zealanders are renowned.

Because in spite of all the rhetoric from expats about why they left, this is still a damn fine country.

I still get tears in my eyes when I hear the national anthem or a stirring haka.

I love the brilliant red of pohutukawa against a sparkling sea; and the sound of the bugle on Anzac Day.

I love baches - real baches, that is, made of fibrolite and filled with old clothes and candlewick bedspreads.

And I like the way our roofs are all different colours when you fly into Auckland, not uniformly brown as they are in Sydney or London.

I like pies in petrol stations, and the international cuisine which arrived with the thousands of new New Zealanders - sushi and pesto and the world-class crema on the coffee at my favourite cafe just down the road.

I like it that Eftpos is everywhere; and that people shower every day (something you take for granted until you travel); and I am proud of the way we still punch above our weight in every sphere of endeavour.

I love the fact that the indigenous people of this land are my neighbours and friends, which would be a lot less common in Australia - and that there all kinds of accents at our neighbourhood barbecues. On one side of my fence there are South Africans, on the other Japanese-Canadians.

I like kapa haka and Jandals, the corner dairy and Victorian villas; I like cabbage trees and deserted beaches, locally made wine and friendly shop assistants, made-in-New-Zealand films and home-grown music.

In short, and at the risk of sounding overly sentimental, I am proud to be a Kiwi and I want to raise my daughter to feel the same way, surrounded by lifelong friends and extended family and with a keen sense of identity and heritage.

I don't want to bring her up as a little Australian, even though if we moved to the Gold Coast we could afford to live in a nicer house and drive a car with four hubcaps.

I don't want to raise a little English girl either, even though, given recent developments, it might be good for her education.

The British Government proposed last week, very sensibly, to have an NCEA-type assessment system for practical subjects such as photography, but to retain the exam-based system for all academic subjects.

There is no question that New Zealand has problems. We have moved far from the ideals and values on which Western society was founded; we are no longer a haven from crime or environmental poisoning; and although the economy is supposedly booming, most households seem to be struggling.

We need to address the student loan problem, the lack of tax incentives for businesses, and how hard it is to break into the housing market.

But I for one am sticking around to be a part of the solution, no matter how insignificant.

Maybe the million or so Kiwis living overseas could be a part of it, too, if we viewed them as an offshore asset or community, in the way the Irish and Jewish do.

Does Kevin Roberts, the worldwide CEO of Saatchi and Saatchi, do good things for our economy despite living mainly overseas? You bet.

In the age of the internet, surely geography is less important. Roberts himself says a supportive, patriotic network of New Zealanders living offshore could benefit our economy hugely if cultivated and connected in the right way. He has even founded a website, nzedge.com, to promote the idea.

Count me out of the overseas community, however. I'm staying fairly and squarely in the shade of the pohutukawa tree, eating a hokey-pokey ice cream and watching my daughter play in the surf.