What a Job Posting That Went Viral Says About New Zealand

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/world/australia/viral-job-haast-west-coast.html

Version 0 of 1.

The Australia Letter is a weekly newsletter from our Australia bureau. Sign up to get it by emailThis week’s issue is written by Natasha Frost, a reporter with the Australia bureau.

The “advertisement for a dream job in a land far, far away” is a distinctive subgenre of viral news stories. Maybe you would like to relocate to Saalfelden, Austria, and become a professional cave hermit. Or you might envision yourself quitting your desk job to become Japan’s first full-time foreign ninja.

If either of these sound like the sort of escapism you crave, you might have been one of the 1,383 people from 24 countries who have applied to be a “biodiversity supervisor” for the Department of Conservation on New Zealand’s remote West Coast. Applications closed on Tuesday.

The job will be based in the township of Haast, which has a population of about 85 people, and involves working with endangered New Zealand wildlife, like a rare sub-breed of the southern brown kiwi; monitoring fur seal populations; and working on the country’s innovative and extensive predator control measures.

“Haast is an extremely special place to live, surrounded by mountains and ocean, with endless activities for an outdoor enthusiast,” the advertisement reads.

Even by the standards of New Zealand, which in the 1990s marketed itself as at “the edge of the world,” Haast is remote. The local school has just eight students. The nearest airport is a three-hour drive away, the nearest hospital four. The town rates a 1 out of 9 — the lowest possible score — on the Bortle light pollution scale, putting it on a par with the most uninhabited areas of Alaska, Utah and Wyoming.

Although New Zealand is usually thought of as very rural, that is not the situation for most of its residents. More than 85 percent of people live in cities and towns, with about a third of the population in Auckland, the largest city.

As is the case anywhere, living in remote areas, like Haast, means accepting a life of relative isolation, with poorer access to services. The hollowing out of New Zealand’s international tourism industry because of two years of pandemic border closures has made it even harder to live in these townships, however beautiful the landscape might be.

And so when this job was originally posted, only three people applied for it.

None had the required qualifications (one optional but “preferred” extra included full accreditations for handling kiwi, the national bird), so the deadline was extended. Stuff, a New Zealand news outlet, then picked up the story — the job in paradise that no one wanted — and it went viral internationally.

A subsequent interview with Wayne Costello, a regional spokesman for the Department of Conservation, by Agence France-Presse was reprinted in outlets around the world, including in Austria, Germany, Romania, the United Arab Emirates, South Africa, and India, the department said.

Of the hundreds of applications from 24 different countries, which included Finland, Paraguay and South Africa, only a few dozen met the criteria and had the required work visa.

Unsurprisingly, a few things were lost in translation: One German-language version of the story, which had relied on an online translation from English, erroneously suggested that the job included saving not a rare flightless bird but “New Zealand’s rarest kiwifruit species.”

It’s a funny story, but one that, to me, says something about how the world sees New Zealand: as an opportunity to escape. (Its growing reputation among the superrich as a bolt-hole — a place insulated from the perils of nuclear war or pandemic — has probably helped to bolster that image.)

New Zealanders sometimes describe themselves as living in a “meme country”: the sort of place people don’t really take seriously internationally. And though they, for the most part, are fiercely proud of their home — for its beauty, its Indigenous heritage and its ability to outperform other much larger nations on the world stage — they would also be the first to say that it is a more complicated, and perhaps worse, place to live in than most imagine.

New Zealand is fantastically, jaw-droppingly beautiful. But health care in the country is struggling. About 20 percent of children live in poverty. And it has entrenched economic problems, including housing that manages both to be inadequate in supply and quality yet among the most expensive in the world. As I wrote in The Times this week, it has also been roundly criticized by the United Nations for its policy on disability and migrants.

Bernard Hickey, a local economics writer, had this advice for young New Zealanders struggling to buy a home: “Australia wants you. Just go.”

The gulf between how the country is perceived, and how it actually is, was on my mind this week as I spoke to democracy experts in New Zealand as part of a story by my colleague, Damien Cave, the Sydney bureau chief.

They stressed that while the system mostly works, there are entrenched problems with inequality, low voter turnout and a lack of transparency over donations to political parties. Some of the country's success, multiple people noted, has more to do with New Zealand’s small size than it does with anything intrinsic to its democracy.

All that said, there is one positive feature of New Zealand that should, if anything, receive more attention.

Timothy Kuhner, a law professor at the University of Auckland who grew up in the United States, put it like this: “If the United States is the country of ‘where I work and what I do is my identity, and my time is money, but we’re really nice in small towns,’ I feel like New Zealand really is a country of general decency toward each other, and fairness.”

Here are this week’s stories.

For Many Disabled People, a Battle to Stay in Australia or New Zealand. The two countries are outliers in routinely rejecting potential migrants on the basis of medical needs, leaving some families to struggle in a legal limbo.

In Search of a Lost Spain. In the southern part of the country, churches and streets hold the remnants of eight centuries of Islamic rule.

Who Wears Crop Tops to the Office? Young employees, many of them new to office jobs, are bringing a wardrobe staple usually reserved for the weekends into the workplace.

Jennifer Lawrence’s Next Move. The Oscar-winning “Hunger Games” actress is free from her franchise commitments. But after a brief hiatus from acting, what will she do now?

‘Fast Furniture’ Is Cheap. And Americans Are Throwing It in the Trash. The mass-produced furniture that sold furiously during the pandemic could soon be clogging landfills.

Are you enjoying our Australia bureau dispatches?Tell us what you think at NYTAustralia@nytimes.com.

Enjoying the Australia Letter? Sign up here or forward to a friend.

For more Australia coverage and discussion, start your day with your local Morning Briefing and join us in our Facebook group.