You're needed at home, expat New Zealanders told

Diana Cook expected to stay away from New Zealand for only a year. After growing up in the small Northland town of Kaikohe, the Treasury-trained economist left a Wellington job for a position in Ukraine six years ago. That job led to a role as an economic consultant in Oxford, and now, as a consultant in London, she is part of an international team providing expenditure advice to governments in Serbia, Armenia and Bosnia.

The small-town girl is one of hundreds of thousands of skilled New Zealanders the Government wants to lure home. But the 34-year-old has bigger plans. She is about to start a new job in Britain, analysing housing shortages in southeast England.

Asked if she would heed the call to return home, she says: "I do miss family and friends and I think there would be interesting career opportunities for me in New Zealand. The downside for me is New Zealand's isolation. It feels so small and so far away. Travel is pretty expensive and I'd really miss the theatres and galleries, and other entertainment options in London. So it's more of a lifestyle than a career choice for me to stay here."

After calling mothers to the workforce to plug skill gaps, the Government will soon launch a campaign targeting expats, focusing on Kiwis' emotional links to their homeland. We're up against other Western countries also campaigning for our skilled workers. And our Government has an even bigger job than such countries as Australia - with at least 14 per cent of working New Zealanders offshore (Treasury's estimate), we are first in the OECD in losing our residents abroad.

Immigration Minister Paul Swain says the campaign will involve "creative ways" of target-ing expats. He thinks many offshore Kiwis have no idea that unemployment here is now the lowest in the OECD and there are jobs to fill.

Says Swain: "When these people left in the 1990s, New Zealand would have been a completely different place. Unemployment was still quite high and there were too many people and not enough jobs. We now have the complete reverse of that, with too many jobs and not enough people. There are now opportunities for them that may not have been around when they left. We'll be saying we need them to give us a hand."

There are two types of expats overseas and one is possibly out of reach. According to a Massey University "talent flow" study, there are expats who expect to stay away, mainly driven by money, influence and achievement; then there are those who plan to come home, who are lured back by family, lifestyle and friends. About half of the 2201 expats surveyed last year described themselves as "permanently settled" and 27 per cent of those were certain or likely to stay overseas. A further 29 per cent were - like Cook - torn about where they would end up.

Typically university-educated, many were working in the financial sector. Just under half had been away from New Zealand for one to five years, while half had been away for six years-plus. Asked what needed to change for them to return home, most cited career opportunities, higher pay and a better cost of living, along with improved tax incentives for business.

But it is the emotional attractions likely to be highlighted in the Government's campaign: ageing parents and relatives, a yearning to bring up children back home, safety, security, and lifestyle.

"Return to New Zealand apparently provides more of an attraction to the family-oriented, the sociable and the presumably humanistic medical staff, but repels those seeking career success and money, and the successful ... entrepreneurs," the report says.

One of the researchers, Massey University business lecturer Duncan Jackson, is not sure how easy it will be to entice Kiwis home. "We've found that careers are pushing people overseas - both my brothers went to London and they've found they could make astoundingly more money over there and also enjoy career progression."

When looking for carrots to dangle, we should look at countries like Singapore, he says, which reduces student loans for those who agree to stay home.

"There are schemes operating to hold people in other countries. Here we have the student loan scheme which is unfair and punitive, and if you have a massive loan and can earn three times more in the UK, where would you go?"

The Massey study found only 10 per cent of participants had a student loan, mainly because the mean age was 30-plus. "[The student loan] can be expected to increase in importance as more and more young qualified people go offshore," it said.

One of those paying off his student loan is Mark Hotton, the London-based editor of a newspaper for expat New Zealanders, New Zealand News UK. Hotton is waiting for a highly skilled migrant visa which will allow him to stay in London for at least another year and possibly up to four. Student loans "are a major sticking point," he says. "The Government needs to address this or a whole generation of Kiwis will take out loans and not come back to pay them off."

New Zealand's campaign comes as Australia also tries to keep its best and brightest on home soil and increases its skilled migrant quota. New Zealand shares a common job market with Australia, and both countries are battling to find enough trades and technical staff.

Treasury policy manager Geoff Lewis says we suffer a similar problem to countries such as Canada and Ireland, which lose talent to bigger neighbours. Australia, which worries that it is bleeding talent, has only 2.1 per cent of its nationals offshore. "We would like to have lots of highly skilled people but we need the wages to attract them," he says.

That's a point echoed by recruitment firms struggling to fill job vacancies. Rob Young, a partner with Swann Recruitment, which fills senior executive positions, says the strength of the Kiwi dollar and low wages are turn-offs about returning to New Zealand. And while there are jobs, career opportunities can be limited - take the senior manager in Bahrain who was offered a $120,000 job to return to New Zealand but was already earning double that.

At Phoenix Recruitment in Auckland, Jenny Durno has 150 chartered accountancy vacancies to fill. Accountants are one profession the country is short of, and Durno says Kiwis can earn between $75,000 and $108,000 in Australia for a job that would pay between $55,000 and $75,000 here.

On a recent trip home, Diana Cook found New Zealand "a bit insular". But in London she fights the crowds on her hour-long train journey to and from work, then returns to her costly rental property with a tiny garden. "A campaign should focus on the lifestyle benefits of New Zealand," she says.

However: "There's not much a Government campaign could do to encourage me to return really. It's more of a personal trade-off that I have to make."

- Herald on Sunday