On People Moving To Melbourne

And how my friends have stopped moving because they want to and started moving because they have to.

The job market’s bad and it’s ruining my social life. Ever since our white supremacist government won in 2023, my friends have been leaving for Australia in droves. This isn’t a new phenomenon, nor is it an unreasonable one. But in the last year, there was a qualitative shift in the reasons people told me they were moving to Australia. They went from speaking the language of opportunity to the language of desperation. People who told me they never wanted to leave Aotearoa New Zealand are moving to Australia because they can’t find work here.

I understand the reasons people move. They joke, somewhat accurately, that you can get a $40k pay rise just by setting foot in Melbourne. There are more jobs in Australia. Its housing stock is marginally better than Aotearoa New Zealand’s, and those pay increases mean that white-collar workers can afford to live in insulated apartments rather than decaying shacks. I think the rationale is that if you’re going to live in a white supremacist settler-state, you might as well live in one where you have running-around money rather than one where you stress every time you’re at the grocery store. The numbers speak for themselves: in 2024, an estimated 52,500 people between 18-30 left New Zealand for greener pastures. Australia attracts young people instead of repelling them.

My commercially ambitious friends were always going to leave. If you want money for creative endeavors or to start a business, New Zealand isn’t the place to do it. But last year, something shifted more notably. Friends I love dearly, who had no interest in moving to Australia, are leaving because they can’t get good jobs here. They’ve been laid off in New Zealand, applied for hundreds of jobs, slogged through welfare cuts, and told me they can’t keep fighting for minimum wage jobs when a better life is just across the pond. They tell me they want to learn te reo Māori, that they don’t want to leave their families, and that they love the place they were born. But they can’t afford to stay. The tone of their moving announcements has shifted from excitement to resignation. They’re not leaving because they’re excited to. They're sad because they have to.

This joblessness is the direct result of government policy. When our far-right government took power in early 2024, one of the first things they did was cut tens of thousands of government jobs to force people into unemployment. This is an example of something called a Volcker Shock, or an intentional government effort to discipline the working class. Government officials and propagandists claimed it was to “tame inflation,” but they’re white supremacists and they’re lying. In the capitalist class’s eyes, working people had it too good with Covid subsidies, our wages got too high, and they needed to remind us who was boss. Mass firings and cuts to welfare programs accomplished this. They made us desperate, hungry, distracted, and willing to flee. Crucially, they make people too concerned with survival to fight the pillage and sale of Aotearoa’s natural resources.

These economic maneuvers are manifestations of a deeper cultural problem: that white boomers feel like they own New Zealand. They feel like Providence gifted it to them after World War Two, when houses cost five dollars and stolen land was plentiful, and that their children and grandchildren should make their fortunes elsewhere. They treat this place like it’s their nature reserve and their retirement island and they think that anyone who doesn’t own property should serve them or leave. In their eyes, anyone who remains should be buried with them like servants in a pharaoh’s tomb. They’re an Antipodean death cult, and any attempt to build a collective life here requires joining an organized political movement to push back against their private property regime.

I think my friends are leaving because they’ve intuited that under this property regime, things won’t get better til they get worse. In the 1840s, Marx and Engels coined the term “reserve army of labour” to describe how capitalist states require a percentage of the working class to be unemployed to keep wages down. Bosses need to be able to threaten workers with financial ruin to make them accept scraps. The “reserve army of labour” theory posits that the only time a capitalist economy permits full employment is when it goes to war, like the U.S. government employing people during World War II after the Great Depression. In Erich Fromm’s The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, he writes that war is the only condition in which the capitalist ruling class encourages people on the same side to care for rather than compete with each other against an external enemy.

No sane person would go to war if they were stably employed, but someone desperate for a paycheck might. Under that logic, I think the western world’s going to keep increasing unemployment as it prepares for its suicidal war on China. This is a war that the West is going to lose: it couldn’t beat the North Korean juche, the Viet Cong, the Taliban, Russia in Ukraine, Hamas’s Al-Quassam Brigades, and now the Houthi’s Ansar Allah ones, and there’s no way that Donald Trump and Keir Starmer are going to beat a united Chinese-Russian front.

In his Vanity Fair piece on NATO, James Pogue wrote that Biden’s 2022 promise to “reduce the [Russian] ruble to rubble” failed catastrophically because Russia had “lots of farms and factories capable of producing real goods, so being cut off from Western markets didn’t lead to mass shortages.” He also wrote that Biden’s sanctions had the “seismic effect of showing that a major power could be kicked out of the dollar-based financial system without facing calamity.” That economic resilience, combined with China’s technological leaps and political discipline, spells disaster for any power going to war with them. Westerners seem to have forgotten, per Walter Rodney, that they only conquered Africa in the late 19th and early 20th centuries because they had technologically superior breech-loading rifles and machine guns: a technological edge they no longer hold. But none of this knowledge, apparent to anyone who looks closely at the subject, will stop our leaders from ratcheting up the pressure til a wartime paycheck feels like a relief rather than a Faustian bargain.

I don’t know how many of my friends know the term “reserve army of labor,” but I think they correctly sense the New Zealand government isn’t going to improve their lives without extracting a fatal concession first. They’re not going to build us nice houses until we kill people for them. In that context, a move to Australia makes sense. The moderately larger table scraps capitalists give workers there will allow them to live more dignified lives until America starts its world war. It doesn’t change the fact that I miss them, though, and that I’m very sad they’re gone.

Tāmaki (Auckland) Events

• The Capitol Cinema Film Club is playing Michelangelo Antonioni's The Passenger (1975) about a man who assumes a dead man’s identity on Wednesday, April 30 at 8pm at The Capitol Cinema in Mt. Eden. Antonioni's L’Eclisse (1962), which I also saw at the film club, is one of my favorite movies, so I’m looking forward to this one.

Recommended Reading

• I was unexpectedly moved by this essay by Sarah Miller on getting Botox, specifically the line “I used to ask men for directions, and there would often be a look in their eyes like, ‘This is my lucky day.’ Now it’s more often, ‘Why doesn’t this bitch know where she’s going?’”

• I liked this essay by P.E. Moskowitz on the TV show 30 Rock and the end of the liberal capitalist order.